Green Tesla Motors: Another Day, Another Solyndra
The resignation of Jonathan Silver, the U.S Energy Department’s top loan officer, over the Solyndra scandal may be the tip of the iceberg. He supervised a much larger DOE loan program that suffers from the same problems as Solyndra: over the last 18 months, the Department has awarded more than $9 billion in below-market loans to auto companies under its Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program.
The most troubling transaction: a $465 million loan to California’s Tesla Motors. Tesla received a loan rate of 1.6% from DOE to manufacture an all-electric car that will sell for nearly $50,000. It will not exactly be the people’s car. Tesla also builds luxury sports cars that retail for $103,000 to $128,000.
Tesla also is no simple new age car company. It is owned and financed by big donors to the Democratic Party and to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Tesla’s principal owner is Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal. He has an estimated personal wealth of $672 million. His firm received venture capital from the The Westly Group, Daimler Chrysler, and from Abu Dhabi investors. The firm has partnerships with luxury sports car manufacturer Lotus and with Mercedes-Benz.
The secret to access to the DOE money is The Westly Group, run by California Democratic Party stalwart and big Obama campaign bundler Steve Westly. The former eBay executive wasn’t merely a prodigious fundraiser for Obama, raising $500,000 for his presidential campaign. He also served as the president’s California campaign co-chairman. Another Obama $500,000 bundler was Solyndra investor George Kaiser and his foundation.
Westly got statewide attention in 2006 when he spent $35 million of his own money to run an ugly and largely negative race against California state Treasurer Phil Angelides for governor.
Westly is a personal friend of President Obama, and since the election has visited the White House for meetings and social parties. He privately dined with the president in February with a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires. It was called the “trillion-dollar dinner.”
Westly was rumored to be on Obama’s energy secretary short list. When he lost out to physicist Steven Chu, the White House got him a seat on a pivotal DOE advisory committee that made recommendations to the secretary on alternative energy policies. The committee voted in favor of changes to federal rebates for all electric cars — which would benefit Tesla.
Westly’s Washington political connections to the White House have made him a “pied piper” of DOE money for start-ups. DOE records show that Westly’s venture capital firm has reaped at least $500 million in DOE loans for his companies, wowing Silicon Valley’s VC community.
Westly also sat on Tesla’s board of directors early in the car company’s life.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk also has been a generous donor to the Democratic National Committee, contributing more than $120,000 over three different election cycles and $292,250 to political campaigns, overwhelmingly to Democrats.
Financial analyst Brian Krasting has called the DOE loan program “free money” for all electric car manufacturers at taxpayer expense. Others have called the Tesla deal a form of “corporate welfare” for the president’s friends. There have been complaints from alternative energy companies that the ATVM loans were awarded because of political connections.
DOE defends the Tesla loan, telling PJMedia it was sound and neutrally approved by its financial analysts. However, the DOE spokesman also acknowledged not knowing of the company’s plan for a $200 million NASDAQ IPO when it awarded the firm the loan. Nor did the spokesman say DOE knew Toyota was to become its partner in the plant when DOE issued the loan.
There is a general question of competence regarding the DOE loan staff’s ability to examine the 130 loan applications they received from high-tech firms. A February 2011 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that the staff did not have adequate expertise for evaluating the “green” companies that were seeking the loans:
Without qualified oversight to analyze the information submitted by the borrowers and to provide technical monitoring, the ATVM program cannot be adequately assured that the borrowers are delivering the vehicle and component projects as required by the loan agreements.
Rep. Cliff Stearns — chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the Solyndra scandal — tells PJMedia he is launching an investigation “looking at the entire program, and some specific companies.”
The Model S, for which DOE awarded Tesla most of the $465 million, reportedly will sell for as much as $67,000. The company has yet to record a single quarter of profit and continues to see its own stated production schedule slip. It now promises that the Model S will be launched at the end of 2012, a year late.
Tesla says it still hopes to sell the base model for around $47,000 before governmental rebates. That still may be too steep a tag even for environmental enthusiasts.
When the White House gave a half-billion dollar loan to Tesla, President Obama lauded it as “[a] historic opportunity to ensure that the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks are made in America.”
While on the committee, Westly supported a $7,500 instant rebate for electric car buyers. (Most federal rebates come long after a sale, when a customer files his income tax forms.) The new rule supported by Westly automatically deducts the $7,500 off the retail price of a car at the time of the sale. The regulation is now in force and will apply for all Tesla customers.
I wrote this to Fox’s News Watch on October 8:
Hello,
Alan Colmes made a reference to Tesla Motors for the second time this week as an example of successful investment into green energy by Obama administration (first on Bill O’Reilly show and now again on News Watch). Pray tell, by what definition is this investment successful?
Granted, Tesla Motors is not (yet) in Chapter 11. But it’s first product – $109,000 Roadster – is no longer in production, and future products are not scheduled to go on the market until Mid-2012. Tesla will unlikely to turn a profit as an automaker, and in best-case scenario will be a supplier to (or be bought by) one of the established automakers. Worst-case scenario – it will declare bankruptcy.
My very liberal friend told me several years ago that Fox keeps Colmes intentionally – to show the viewers how stupid liberals are… He may have a point!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/03/BUHQ1K48VH.DTL&ao=all
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/06/29/tesla-a-133-billion-pile-of-what.aspx
PS: Not sure if this is a duplicate – apologize if it is!
Tesla not firing on all Solyndras?
Seems that if you have any company with the words “solor” or “electric” in it, you are guaranteed a multi-million dollar very-low-interest loan. And the American taxpayer has yet to see any, ANY, of these schemes do anything except waste more money. So why aren’t the protesters on Wall Street screaming about this? Why aren’t they demanding this money? And why do they want to throw more money down a rat hole that has yet to produce one decent and affordable idea?
Republicans MUST make more of this both during the primaries and during the general election. The American people MUST be reminded of this so that they can put an end to it in 2012. The age of “free money” has to be over, before we all go broke.
Billions & billions for bailouts, stimulus programs, entitlements, fraud, waste & abuse – we’re already broke, Liberty. And yes, Republicans must make more of this during the primaries & general, but sadly, odds are they won’t.
So why aren’t the protesters on Wall Street screaming about this?
Because: 1. Most are ill-informed and don’t have a clue; 2. Many don’t care so long as “their” group (the Democrat party) is the one doing the pillaging & plundering of the U.S. Treasury; 3. They think it’s the role of government to provide handouts to freeloaders everywhere, again, so long as they get theirs.
You are correct, RockThisTown: The OWS protesters are barking up the wrong tree. Everyone inside the Beltway must be on pins and needles hoping the protests don’t end up where they SHOULD be: on the lawn of the Capitol and outside the White House.
The problem goes back many decades – this is not a R or D issue – it is basic corruption by lobbyists to elect and keep their politicians in office. Forever………
Herman Cain would agree with you on that.
It seems that it is also a prerequisite to be a big donor/bundler for the Democrat party. And, you must worship at the altar of Global Warming/Climate Change, “Green Energy” being a derivative concept of the ALGORIAN New Earth Religion.
The democrats have been deriding the republicans for being greedy capitalists but the above article shows that democrats are more than greedy capitalists, they are thieves. It’s one thing to earn your profits with hard work and ingenuity and quite another to connive to cheat people, and even worse to use political power to cheat the taxpayers. I hope the republican candidates will stop picking on each other and follow Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in making their campaigns against the democrats rather than each other.
True, the Democrats have done and excellent job of branding the Republicans as the “party of the rich” but per a MotherJones survey, 8 out of the 10 richest in Congress are Democrats, they have backers like George Soros, Warren Buffett, 90% or more of Hollywood.
With regard to the OWS crowd, they need to know that Wall St bankers, dealers and financiers are the biggest cash contributors to Obama & the Democrats. Yet if you polled OWS types, you’d find that the vast majority are pro-Obama and anti-Tea Party.
Herman Cain is another establishment stooge, our only choice as freedom loving people would be Ron Paul for president. No National Sales tax or Federal Reserve Bankers.
Ron Paul is becoming too old to be president, so forget it. In the past I’ve voted for him several times, when he actually ran and otherwise as a write in. This time I will vote for Cain or write him in. I will NOT vote for another “settle” type, i.e. Romney. Many others that I know see it my way and therefore Obama will most likely win a second term. At this point I don’t care as I have a dual citizenship and can escape. American voters are generally ignorant and whatever happens to them they deserve. Comment on the OWS crowd, I bet there are no engineering or hard science majors among those “students” that complain about not being able to find work.
Really!!! You will not vote for the only honest candidate because he is old?
So, let me get this straight. Here’s a guy who has plenty of venture capital of his own, yet has no qualms whatsoever in taking tax dollars to fund his company? Add to that, he’s now in powerful social circles that allow him to hobnob with people of influence and can go to the white hut to chillax?
Most likely this is to elevate him to some social status that he finds most impressive. But in my little neck of the woods, it only means to me that he’s a nerdy little metrosexual of a very high exponent and is lacking in ethics, morals and character. Oh, wait, he’s a Kalifornia Demokrat, so I’m being redundant.
On the face of it, it’s “being with the cool club” trumping all else. A 1980′s haircut movie gone horribly bad.
Used to be that entrepreneurs found private investors for their boondoggles and bad ideas but now they go straight to uncle obie. Obie must find that particularly satisfying to have that kind of control over people. I suppose it could be that Musk is just “working both sides of the street” in a particularly savvy and clever fashion but at some point, an ethical person has to say, “This is a bad idea. If this gets exposed, my company could end up in a bad light.”
But then, with even the most negative exposure, which will never happen from the MSM, (For if they did, it would get a pass because they are involved in saving Gaia and their intentions are so angelic as to be untouchable.)but in a real, thinking world it would result in the (appropriate) downfall of Tesla Motors.
Once again, the media lets the people down. Tax dollars spend so foolishly as to be called blind stupidity.
But I can’t help but think that Captain Zero knows this and is “playing people” even in his own cabinet because he knows that electric cars are BS and by throwing money at it, it makes millions “go away” and further breaks the federal bank. Or a combination of “good intentions” with blind ignorance with an added helping of arrogance makes it the perfect storm for wasting money.
And since when is the federal government supposed to be financially backing ANYONE?
*sigh* It’s bloody depressing seeing how,in this country, government carpetbaggers are trying to force a command and control economy. No wonder other corporations are not investing any of their money for growth; They are in fear of what this government will do to them if they try to expand.
And when Tesla goes bankrupt? Who will take the fall? Certainly not Captain Zero. Nor, apparently any of the bun(g)dlers who got the dipwad some cash for his stash…some “walking around money”.
Corruption on a grand scale. It always stinks. Makes this nation look like Chi(t)cago.
I’m not surprised that I’m not surprised. The so-called environmental movement was corrupted long ago — shortly after it got into bed with governments.
The giveaway that the “green bigots ” (Thomas Sowell) are fundamentally uninterested in human well-being is their habitual reaction to any development that gives us hope of a new, cleaner power source. Indeed, it’s disputable that they truly care about environmental cleanliness: after all, the cleanest known power source currently in use is nuclear, and they’re all but unanimously against it.
Political power seems to be the point…which has the ugliest imaginable implications for the character and motives of any office-seeker who aligns himself with the environmentalists.
The Blackberry issue was explained to Obama shortly after inauguration. He knew it did not meet executive privilege criteria. From February 6, 2009 White House Counsel Greg Craig http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020503817.html “He is in the process of helping clarify the ethics rules that Obama issued to fulfill his campaign promise of a more transparent government, explaining gift bans and other policies to the new staff. (He even had a hand in winning a waiver for the famed presidential BlackBerry, though he said it was an issue he would not discuss.” What liars this WH are.
Oh, it gets better. In Colorado, you can get a $50k tax break on buying a Tesla
check out the bumper sticker on the Tesla pictured at the link:
” Environmentalists took money from the poor to pay me to buy this car”
The advantage of not teaching history is that no one has anything to learn. The system described in the above-article is German National Socialism of the 1930s – pure Fascism – Government of the People by the unelected elites.
That’s what a mixed economy (like ours) really is: A socially benign form of fascism. It’s fascism without the secret police and the concentration camps, in which the coercion is done by subsidizing some and taxing others.
Consider that both the secret police and the concentration camps are ready and waiting for an occasion whether true natural disaster or conspiracy leading to their application. . Search FEMA underground . Then observe this:
Back on December 21, 2009, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) power-grab, illegally imposed strict, job-killing restrictions on the Internet. The move was no doubt fueled by Tea Party successes, and a growing fear among liberals that conservatives needed to be silenced. That said, the FCC move wasn’t widely reported. In fact, many are unsure as to what the new Net Neutrality rules actually mean. What is certain, however, is that in seizing the Internet Obama has also muzzled the greatest mechanism of growth in our history (under the guise of promoting “freedom” for all), and taken one giant step closer to controlling the unfettered access to news and information that we read.
http://www.grassfire.com/141/petition.asp?Ref_ID=8341&RID=32535710
The DeLorean Motor Company reincarnated. I guess they couldn’t fit the gull wing doors to a roadster. Perhaps we can get the Northern Ireland Development Company interested in buying the USA’s interest.
Elon Musk is also the head of Space X, another company which I have written about here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-pulls-the-plug-on-a-great-run-in-space/
Others, of course, have defended the company as representing “private” space flight. Private means “Not Nasa, but getting money from the federal governemnt.”
Telsa seems to have been financed by a similar model.
Respectfully beg to differ.
Unlike your other examples, Elon Musk is getting real-world results.
SpaceX delivered hardware for the money NASA spent on their design study,
and has a business plan which could turn a profit on space launches.
Tesla is selling luxury sports cars to the rich, and attempting to offer
a practical people’s electric car. As usual, the ‘engineering impossibility’
of improving power storage and charge time is being overtaken by reality,
so he may succeed; This will not change the fact that there is not enough
infrastructure to support everybody going electric, or that most people
will not be buying any $50K cars in the future, even those whose current
gas-hog SUV cost more than that.
I’m not sure that’s comparable.
Obviously the Government has to buy stuff, and to do so they have to issue contracts to private companies. But it’s recognized that the government market has needs and requirements that differ from the consumer marketplace.
It’s one thing for the Government to buy a rocket or a spaceship or a missile or a fighter jet or a submarine from private companies. It’s another thing for the Government to subsidize companies to create products for the consumer marketplace.
I also respectfully disagree on SpaceX.
SpaceX is what’s “right” about Elon Musk and the space program. Please don’t conflate SpaceX and Tesla just because they have the principal CEO in common.
Nevertheless, I have been fully aware of Tesla and its implications, and I don’t like them, especially in light of the fact that SpaceX is an outstanding example of what American entrepreneurship should look like, which to people like me presents a quandary, because Tesla Motors is the polar opposite. My biggest concern is how a Tesla collapse and scandal will affect SpaceX.
Also, if Westly has been using the DOE loans to help capitalize his various ventures, has Musk been doing the same by syphoning off Tesla money to SpaceX? I sincerely hope not, nor has anyone said so.
I’m sure there is an innocent explanation to all of this!
And CA Congressman Henry Waxman’s last 2 remaining brain cells are thinking up it up right now.
Waxman called and he is going with: racism!
That’s why they call it ‘green.’ It’s taking all our greenbacks away from us.
Cronyism is an insidious form of corruption that’s systemic in our government.
Consider also what just happened in a federal court in Texas. A Dallas business owner was involved in a civil dispute and paid millions of dollars to lawyers, and when he objected to additional fees after settling the case, they had a “friendly” Clinton appointee judge seize all of his possessions, without any notice or hearing, and essentially ordered him under “house arrest” as an involuntary servant to the lawyers. The business owner has been under this “servant” order for 10 months and is prohibited from owning any possessions, prohibited from working, etc..
…and some quotes from the judge:
THE COURT: “I’m telling you don’t scr-w with me. You are a fool, a fool, a fool, a fool to scr-w with a federal judge, and if you don’t understand that, I can make you understand it. I have the force of the Navy, Army, Marines and Navy behind me.”
THE COURT: “You realize that order is an order of the Court. So any failure to comply with that order is contempt, punishable by lots of dollars, punishable by possible jail, death”
http://www.lawinjustice.com has an explanation of this case.
Kleptocracy, add that one to the list of names which are available to the Obama/Democrat/Media operation. It’s a hallmark of any and all statist regimes, sell the dopes on a supposedly altruistic program, then steal them & the country blind. All of this is still developing, expanding in exposure, a gigantic insiders theft regime. Who needs a gun and crime, become a Democrat.
Is this the same Telsa with connections to Al Gore ?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125383160812639013.html
There is a very good reason why Capitalism has been a viable ideology in modern times. Advances in technology are adapted in a capitalistic society when the actual cost of implementing a new technology is less than the cost of retaining the technology it will replace. (Read that last sentence again! It is critically important that it is understood.) The only way to accurately determine those costs is in a brutally honest examination by individuals or companies who will invest in the technology as a means to make a profit. They will carefully examine the significance of all the costs of implementing the new technology and its benefits in comparison with the old. If the technology survives this examination and is found to be profitable; it will attract investors and replace the old system. It will have passed the test of having a truly positive economic model and not one artificially supported by government interference.
Government interference driven by ideology, the influence of special interests or political pay offs; skew the normal examination process and can lead to the massive waste of tax dollars in pursuing programs that are destined to fail.
Maybe Chu can explain what’s green about a car that runs on electricity generated from coal.
The CEO & senior staff lied to the City of San Jose about building their car factory there and those communications are actionable.
The CEO & senior staff lied to multiple other cities about building their car factory there and those communications are actionable. They always promise a city or country a factory or sales office and then pull out.
The CEO has been sued by his staff, his wife, his business partners and his suppliers for manipulation and unethical behavior.
The CEO paid GQ magazine to write a story about him to help him get dates. The CEO paid the marketing group for Iron Man to say that Iron Man was based on him. History has shown that megalomaniacs have destroyed every company they have run.
The CEO cheated on his wife with escorts while married. The values of the CEO are the values of the Company. Eolon Musk hires most of the escorts in Silicon Valley.
The car electromagnetic radiation fields from the battery pack cause cancer.
They bribed officials to get their federal loan and the funds expended by them to get that loan are being traced back to sources. The McKinsey guys at DOE are connected on paper to Tesla in extensive conflicts of interest.
The CEO put people into Zap, XP, Ecomotors, Aptera and other electric car companies to sabotage and spy on them. He spied on all of his staff with a fake email campaign. Those situations are actionable.
He was $100,000.00 off, PER CAR, on the cost to build each car. The company has blown tens of millions of dollars on work it had to completely dump in the garbage and start over on.
The company has numerous consumer complaints on price changes, overheating of the battery and charging system and inability to get 220V without huge premiums for the setup.
Nobody is buying the cars anymore and there are hordes of competitors with better electric cars.
These car guys just lie and lie.. Chrysler and GM said “Oh everything will be rosy if you just give us billions in bailout and now we know they fully knew they were going to go bankrupt, they were just hyping it up in order to grab some more cash, Tesla is the same but more. So let me get this right, the Tesla head guy paid GQ magazine to write an article about how arrogant he is and ditched his smart wife and left her with 5 kids for a teenie bopper that he was cheating with. He hires tons of escorts that blog about him afterwards. They announced a battery deal to raise their valuation when they really only signed a generic MOU.
They have multiple lawsuits against them by other companies and the founder. They may have a car that causes cancer from battery EMF. They have created a pool of past staff that write endless blogs about how bad they are. They raised prices on customers who had already paid because they had no idea how to build a car. They lied to the City of San Jose about their factory plans. They applied for their only source of funds from the federal ATVM loan without even reading the rules that told them in advance they should never try to build a factory and is trying to sell an insanely expensive car in a depression while every investor has deeply reviewed them and turned them down and Musk won’t even put his money in (of which he has hundreds of millions) and all of their technology has now been superseded by Fisker, Bright and others with cars that do more for 2/3rds less money. They only got their ATVM money because the two local guys from the DOE big accounting consultancy knew the Tesla people. Tesla employees are so ready to jump ship that Musk spies on them with fake internal email. The head executive there put shills inside of other competing electric car companies to sabotage their funding and technology efforts and screwed up Aptera, Zap, and others. So:
Marty, the founder of Tesla, has said that Musk is a “liar”, “cheat”, “manipulator” and has “no idea what he is doing”
Musk abandoned his wife and kids for a teeny bopper actress and cheated on his marriage vows
Musk blew tens of millions of dollars on wasted engineering and office fluff that has never been, and never will be, used in the car and that has been proved to be wrong by the new engineering staff.
Tesla has sent a pitch letter to almost every VC on Earth and not a single one of them will invest in Tesla because their investigations in due diligence showed the company to be so poorly managed and to have one of the worst debt and financial structures in industry.
Musk had his PR liaison pay GQ magazine to write an article about him about what a stud muffin he was so he could get more dates.
The company has increasing numbers of lawsuits against them and most of those are for ethics issues.
The company needs to sell 1000 cars per day to even come within a hair of meeting their investor, financial and operational costs. They are barely within 5% of that figure.
Now that so many people have quit or left GM , they have revealed that the EV1 (Who killed the electric car) was recalled and crushed because the battery pack was shown to cause cancer. When Musk was told the Tesla battery pack could also cause cancer, he told the engineers to “not dwell on non-issues”.
Tesla conned the city of San Jose and other politicians to write letters for their DOE loan knowing full well they were never going to put a factory in San Jose because it was too expensive to ever do that.
Tesla applied for the DOE loaned even though they do not have the viability or debt ratio to qualify. Tesla has worse financials than Chrysler.
Fisker, Shelby, Bright and dozens of other companies now offer more EV, faster EV, more features in an EV for less money, so there is no reason to buy a Tesla now.
No customer is going to install a 220V or 440 V extra plug on their house and pay for that and the extra energy in any volume.
Musk spied on his staff unethically and created a work environment where nobody cares about the company or the car so the quality is in the hole.
Darryl Sir, Marty the founder, and hosts of famous people have left and blogged or tattled at tech parties on the extreme ills of Musk.
Musk spends almost 400K per month on PR services to exploit his name instead of his company brand.
Tesla changed the prices after customers bought cars because they still are too screwed up to figure out how much their only product costs. If they can’t figure out the cost, then they can’t figure out the engineering so expect a wheel to fly off at 70MPH. Look at how many Tesla’s have already been wrecked. Many times more than Fiskers.
Tesla has wasted so much money that they can never make money so that now Musk funds the company from his PayPal money but it is running out.
Musk’s ex wife does not want to make direct trouble in order to not screw up the alimony but she writes on blogs as “Nancy” or “Ellie” to reveal the true inside stuff she knows about Musk and it isn’t good.
If you buy a Tesla you must REQUIRE an audited copy of their financials, signed, if you want to protect your money.
For anyone who bothers to get the REAL facts, “green” or “alternative” energy is a joke. An EXPENSIVE joke at that.
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit the shale, some say we can get Trillions of barrels – that’s several hundred years worth at our current consumption of under 20 million bbl/day in the US.
We can drill more cleanly, safer and with less pollution than anywhere else. By buying oil from overseas, apart from enriching people who don’t like us and throwing our money away we are just exporting spills and pollution to other countries where people often don’t bother to clean up – we’re just messing up the world by proxy.
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs that would be created by just the run-up to oil exploration, drilling and production. Politicians, just imagine all that lovely tax revenue – without having to raise tax rates….
Of course the serious environmentalists would have us scale back our society. Go back to nice restful horse-and-buggy days……But then who will deal with all that horse-exhaust? Or are those the “shovel-ready” jobs the politicians promised us?
What is “clean energy”? No really, it isn’t as clear as some would have you believe.
If you look at the total energy cycle of an all-electric car from power-generation to transmission, to charging, to engine efficiency, you get about 30% at best (and there will always be the issue of toxic, limited-life batteries) – that’s the same as a reasonably-efficient gas turbine and there are far more efficient ones on the way.
Solar is way too inefficient with current technology (and don’t expect any major breakthroughs soon) – We’d need thousands of acres of panels across the deserts to produce even a reasonable fraction of California’s needs. Then we’d also need huge storage batteries and those are toxic and nasty. We’d also need transmission lines from the deserts to the cities – The environmental lobby would quite rightly have a hissy-fit.
Hydro isn’t available in nearly enough quantity to serve our needs. It kills fish, silts up rivers and basically also messes up the ecology.
Wind power is like solar – hopelessly inefficient and unreliable for our needs. We’d also need those huge battery farms and transmission lines – not to mention acres of windmills and thousands of dead birds.
Geothermal? Wave? Again fraught with problems, quantity and reliability issues.
Hydrogen? Sure but how do you generate, convey, store it. And fuel cell engines output water vapor – proven to many more times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 could ever be.
Thorium micro-nukes could be a solution but they’re still a few years off and there is such a knee-jerk anti-anything-nuclear lobby that they’d probably never get accepted.
What we CAN do in a reasonably short time is increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In Europe they already have next-generation turbo-diesels that get over 100 mpg – compare that to your Prius!
We have huge deposits of oil, gas – if we exploit t
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, dude.
What the hell is wrong with your mind?
If you don’t know how to post a comment (something children and old folks do every day on Facebook), then what can you possibly know about science?
Did you just post your Master’s Thesis?
You should ask for your money back.
Hey, what did you expect? It’s the plastic fantastic economy where economic growth happens by charging up one credit card (The Fed) to keep the other credit cards (corporations, state, and local governments) current. What could go wrong?
Why are we underwriting rebates for “millionaires and billionaires”? After all, who else can afford to purchase a $50,000 to $130,000 car? I personally have a multi-millonaire friend who has one of these vehicles on order as we speak. Now I know why.
OK, so the Tesla is a fast, good looking sedan (until the juice runs out). But so are a Jaguar, or a BMW. But those companies don’t need US government subsidies. If they make a product the market wants, they’re rewarded with profit. So one can be confident they’ll be around years down the road. Tesla? They’ll be history.
DOn’t forget Elon also owns Solar City that got Green loans, and SpaceX that the president directed NASA to make a Commercial crew provider. In all more than a billion in potential subsidies
The SpaceX funding is NOT a subsidy. That is a straight contract with NASA. Plese don’t conflate Musk’s other businesses with SpaceX. SpaceX is one thing that Musk does right.
In a sea of PR and misrepresentation do you really think there is one thing that is completely different, completely out of character. Loan, bailout, contract when the government gives money to its friends uncontested, its all crony capitalism. When a company of little demonstrated performance (at the time) but much hype get put in the front of the line by the president. When the NASA administrator is not in the loop and informed of the “contract” two days before the announcement, this is not a standard competitive procurent, it is crony capitalism.
…When a company of little demonstrated performance (at the time)
The flight of the Dragon was no small thing.
SpaceX is succeeding in a competitive environment, an engineering
environment where assertions, such as yours, do not affect the
real-world trajectory of a launch vehicle, because they are a
private company, not a wholly owned subsidiary of NASA, like
their established big-name competitors.
Take a look at Pajamas Media’s own Bill Whittle defending SpaceX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h_d6YVA1Kg
Another one of those companies accepting new NASA work is XCOR Aerospace, which employed Rich Pournelle as director of business development. Rich Pournelle is the son of noted conservative author Jerry Pournelle.
The actual crony companies in the space industry are the ones that have been getting cost-plus contracts for decades, Boeing and Lockmart, and who are trying now to shift the blame to the upstart newcomer companies.
Sorry Dude, when the President personally decides on a contract without even consulting the relevant agency and subject matter experts who’ll be stuck with it, even if it turns out to be a good deal, it’s still big time crony capitalism!
What puzzles me is that a guy like me, high tech entrepreneur, althogh less successful than this guy, would want to brown nose the Kenyan. Is it some deep desire to feel beloved by their “intellectual sueriors” who have always denigrated money makers and job makers? Cain is an American and a job maker.
This is an object lesson on the nature of capitalism. Capitalism and free markets are not synonymous. They are very closely related and intertwined, like health & fitness, but not the same thing.
A businessman’s objective is to make money, and if a government is willing to give a business taxpayer money — either as a loan, grant, or to help build some white elephant boondoggle, then the businessman is likely to take the money. He hopes that there aren’t too many strings attached, but of late he’s finding that he’s working with a government that’s starting to looke like The Mob. Ask Ford, who smelled a rat, and backed out of a full-court press “bailout,” and opted for a more “modest” loan instead; GM and Chrysler chose to sell their freedom entirely. Or Boeing, which is paid exhorbitant amounts for defense contract work, but is forbidden to open a non-union plant in S. Carolina.
The American business world is full of startling paradoxes, even down to the small entrepreneur level. There is often a huge disconnect between the entrepreneur’s business sense and his politics. I’ve seen it first-hand. Elon Musk, for instance, ought to be a libertarian by natural inclination, and not a liberal Democrat (but that should be true of Hollywood as well). I have heard of small entrepreneurs who think that their initial purchases should be from the government — guranteed “sales” from Uncle Sam to help insure a good start for their business. The “collusion bug” is insidious and will be difficult to root out.
Tesla Motors is a fraud. They do not use any of the free energy tech, that real Tesla devolved. Comrade Obama is just pay off his campaign donors with our tax money. Chicago pay and play.
So let’s see, a rich guy from say, Hollywood, buys a new Tesla and gets a $7,500 instant discount. The $7,500 discount is given back to the dealer by the US Government since it is a cash subsidy. And that means it comes from taxpayer funds.
So…A guy in Iowa making 60K a year pays his taxes and that money subsidizes the rich Hollywood guy so he can have the newest coolest electric car that the taxpayer who is subsiding it couldn’t afford himself?
Right?
Plus there all kinds of state and local subsidies (aka rebates), with totals amounting to more than forty thousand dollars, depending on the car purchased. It’s a complete rip-off. What a crooked company run by crooked multi-millionaires for other crooked multi-millionaires at the expense of the poor and middle class.
http://www.luxist.com/tag/tesla+rebate/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/14/friday-funny-the-guilt-of-tesla/
I just hope the inevitable fall of this country is a soft one and my loved ones are spared the worst. Crony capitalism (or Crapitalism) and no sense of right or wrong any more are surely two of the top reasons.
I believe that Al Gore is also a Tesla investor. Moreover, I suspect without too much digging a link to George Soros can be found.
Anything called green that is seeking or has obtained government funding is corrupt. The Obama administration is a criminal enterprise.
U.S Energy Department should spend some money on aneutronic fusion. It is the most promising energy source to solve the global warming problem, with no risk of radioactive leakage. http://www.crossfirefusion.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
I’ll agree with the poster about business. As a libertarian, I loathe government and all the things it does with taxpayer money. But as a high tech entrepreneur I have no ideology except money; that means taking every advantage that presents itself. So if I had a billion dollars, I’d probably give a chunk to something like Cato… but I would also, as a businessman, play the game within the reality of the existing rules to the limits and with no quarter.
This article is a biased piece of trash. I challenge all of you to visit a tesla store (18 around the world ) and speak with a tesla representative. Then come on back and leave an informed comment.
Directly from Teslas 10Q 8-12-2011:
Capital spending for the Model S program is anticipated to be at its highest level in 2011, as we plan to purchase much of the tooling and manufacturing equipment required for production. We anticipate that most of the capital expenditures on the Model S will be funded by the DOE Loan Facility.
Time for Rep. Issa to look at this folly as well.
I don’t think labeling a product Green could help in controlling the global warming issues the world is facing. The government must think is inventing a cheap a cost reducing technology to overcome such big issues.
http://goo.gl/1dfVq
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