Wish we had some king of green technology that would take CO2 from the air, say by use of solar energy, and store it reliably and cheaply on a mass scale in some form, maybe complex sugars compounds, that we could then easily break down and release the stored energy on demand.

District heat and power schemes are quite popular in some places in Europe. The waste hot water at about 75 C is useless for power generation; it’s extremely useful for space heating. Solar panels on your roof for power generation? Forget it. Solar radiators to heat your hot water supply? That works. I’m sure anyone here can think of other examples. The point is that diffuse sources of energy can be useful in two ways; when the requirement is for low-grade energy (mostly for space heating and heating washing water) or when you can easily and cheaply collect the diffuse energy.

The latter only works if it’s high-grade but low-density like, for example, sunlight. This can be collected by cheap, efficient collectors with a very long period of development behind them, and all we have to do is collect the output. What are these wonderful gadgets called? They are called plants.

Seriously, it pains me to see this squabbling among folks who–at least in terms of the big picture–are on the same team.

Alexis (136), you speak of rural Germany, but all of Germany is only as big as Iowa plus Nebraska. Meanwhile their population is a bit less than 6% of Germany’s. Different animal even before we consider how much lower our levels of acceptable taxpayer subsidy are going to be.

The editor should allow for the sub / sub and sup /sup tags.

I don’t know much about ZPE. Did not study the stuff to have an opinion one way or another. I know of some experiments that may be related and they demonstrate something that does not fit. Whether it is ZPE, not so sure.

As for the cosmology… the current model is not that old. Every day, you’d find in science news a phrase “scientists were puzzled” or an equivalent of it thereof. If you had a model that was 99% accurate reflection of real stuff out there, you should get a confirmation of the model day by day. But alas, it seems to be just the opposite, new epicycles have to be applied, renormalizations inserted into equations to account for the newly discovered phenomena.

No one showed me yet one picture of a star forming from an accretion disk or via a gravitational collapse of a gas cloud. The asteroid belt seems to be as old as our solar system, yet you don’t have a planet there instead that should have enough time to coalesce, instead, you can see from time to time asteroids smashing together and dispersing the debris further. The stupid things won’t coalesce, damn it!

Yet I could go through Hubble pictures and find you probably a thousand of instances of stars forming through a z-pinch. You see them lighting up as a string of pearls along the plasma filaments that are called Birkeland currents.

I were convinced, maybe 10 years ago, like you, that what I was taught at school is true, or at least 99% corresponding model of what is out there. The science is “settled”. Boy, what that reminds me of?

But I’ve noticed the frequent discrepancies, the models inability to account for newly discovered phenomena… way too many puzzlements. Some doubts creeped in earlier, after the Saturn rings were photographed and that incomprehensible twisted one was found… But I thought… maybe that’s the 1% we still don’t know it yet.

And then I saw images of the sun spots, close ups. That moment it downed on me we had it all wrong.

The Electric/Plasma Universe is a model. It seems to have better predictive abilities than the current model. Where there is a puzzlement in mainstream cosmology, I see a confirmation for the electric model that predicted the discovery.

I am not much of an theorist. More of an engineering type. Habeas corpus, show me the body. The math can be often beautiful, but that does not mean it is reflected in reality. The equations that are used as a supportive construct for the existence of black holes is essentially a divide by zero concept. In fact, the concept of the black hole is a more stargatish concept than not.

The current cosmology, with its epicycles and fudges in the form of dark matter and black holes is quite like the AGW in its modus operandi. Theoretical and often political considerations beat the stuff you can touch, beat the data.

Show me the data.

Although my comment about “maritime trade” did refer to commercial exploitation of fish and whale blubber, I was referring more specifically to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s influence upon Theodore Roosevelt.

Although the United States partially recovered its naval power under the Jackson administration, it had been a dismal naval power during the War of 1812. Still, if the United States had concentrated upon naval power rather than hiding behind British naval supremacy (in other words, if it had heeded Mahan’s words one century earlier), it would have become a very different kind of republic (or confederacy).

Strictly speaking, I estimate there was more money to be made in the China trade than even in the fur trade, let alone the settlement of the interior. Indeed, Astor was important in this. I estimate that if the United States had concentrated more of its resources upon building and maintaining a strong navy to help capture and keep maritime trade, the United States could have been fighting the Opium War against China rather than Britain.

Increasing America’s market share in the China trade would have been highly lucrative. I think bullying China would have been more cost effective than, say, the Seminole War. Overall, I think the United States would have gotten richer faster if it had concentrated upon becoming a maritime empire rather than a continental empire. I’m not saying the United States would have been better, merely richer and more envied at a faster pace.

By the way, it is rather amusing that John C. Calhoun was originally in favor of high tariffs so long as he thought he had a real chance of becoming the President of the United States. It was only after Andrew Jackson beat him to the office that he turned against tariffs and promoted the idea of “nullification” (although it did grate on Calhoun’s nerves that northern manufacturers had been a bit too enthusiastic about the tariffs he proposed).

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

G.K. Chesterton (from wikiquote)

At Appomattox the two commanders of the two American armies walked out of the house and into history with the great dignity and humanity that only the victor had the power to so grace that new beginning.