Those are very good points. Seeing the "Pete" Peterson Economics Institute shill for the Kerry/Lieberman-White House energy bill is like boot camp for the mind. How do you leave out solar and put wind on the back burner? Solar is being subsidized by states all around the country. One would think that Chu's ambitious and sensible conservation programs would be in there as well. Maybe they should just focus on the Gulf catastrophe.

See pebble-bed or molten salt designs based on Thorium, for example.

Thanks for including those sources. I've seen Black Gold and it is excellent. I read A Century of War by William Engdahl which was highly engaging although I know he carries some baggage.

had an alternate plan.

It is called the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupation of those places and a handful of other critical oil producing regions of the world.

I did inhale.

And we saw how that worked out. The war for oil piece of the equation was planned out, including the famous Cheney meeting and map that carved Iraq up into neat franchises. Former CIA director Woolsey spoke on CNN after we prevailed and made it clear that any nation wanting in on the oil franchise would have to cooperate with the US in any number of ways. But they blew it. We have Iraq with oil but limited production and we're unable to do anything with Iran, with all of their oil. Makes you wonder if the new game is restricting supply by slowing the production in Iraq.

50 Million people living under bridges will not need so much energy. Nor will 50 million people walking.

The elites know the "average" US lifestyle is not sustainable, and will dramatically fall due reduction in gross income to world averages, and they are planning for this change. When Cheney stated "Our Lifestyle is Not Negotiable", do you believe he meant anything other than the elites' lifestyle?

Maybe they meant a "bridge in our future" instead of a "bridge to the future."

The Republican "opposition" lack alternatives. In addition, they're dominated by fringe elements that make them look too goofy to govern. This creates the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to make alliances with the likes of Peter Peterson. They can do that under the guise of 'bipartisan' politics. Thus, the craziness of Palin, Limbaugh, and the sympathetic Republican office holders allows monopoly-friendly Democrats the claim of being the "reasonable" alternative, "moderate." Half way between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama is ... Pete Peterson.

As for how we get there from here in 2030, the report claims a 5% overall energy use reduction under "business as usual"! The claim for the act's greater "efficiency" comes from. On pages 3 & 4 of the Peterson report, "Energy Sector Changes in the United States," the first paragraph describes how the act works it's magic (also see footnote 8 that ties this act to the "Clean Energy Leadership Act (US Senate 2009)." The description IS the explanation.

The words "conserve" and "conservation" are not used in the report at all.

The New York Times covered the Peterson Institute report and failed to mention that Peterson was behind that organization. Opening paragraph:

Headline: Study: Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill Would Prompt Decade of Job Growth

"Senate climate legislation unveiled last week would spark a decade of multibillion-dollar investments to help overhaul how the nation produces and consumes energy, adding 200,000 jobs per year in the construction of new power plants and through greater demand for biofuels, according to a nonpartisan study (pdf) released today." (The pdf linked is Peterson's report) New York Times, May 20

Fox promotes the Tea Party which dominates the "opposition." The Democrats let Peterson in as the "wise man." And the standards for policy analysis and service to the public go out the window.

honest I read it on the internets

The NK torpedo hit
the Sierra Club torpedo
causing Rush Limbaugh to cough
up a giant hairball
that skipped across the sound stage
hitting Glen Beck right in the nuts
causing him to knock his chalkboard
over into the department of the interior
who in retaliation
farted close to a flame
during an inspection
of the BP oil rig in question
blowing it to smithereens
so yeah, it was the Koreans.

When Rush coughs a hair ball, it causes a ripple in the Noosphere that responsible for all events that follow. Little known fact.

... alternatives?" In my rubishness;), I did manage to answer that question (I corrected the sentence, thank you):

The net effect of the bill is to keep big oil in charge. Petroleum will be 34% of the total energy used under business as usual or the American Power Act scenarios. However, the prices and profits of big oil will rise exponentially. This is a certainty given the increased difficulty of identifying and tapping reserves and the notion of peak oil now adopted by the industry and the political hierarchy. ...

Of major significance, the act creates a guaranteed revenue and profit expansion scheme for big oil by diminishing the impact of highly viable alternative sources of energy."

But you're right. The entire motivation of energy policy is not to serve the public, it is to serve the energy companies. Why else would there be no crash research program to take advantage of solar and wind?

Obama can appoint a commission on this :D I have always wondered why are desert areas are not used for solar collection.

Why else would there be no crash research program to take advantage of solar and wind?

It's an exercise in determining how much land mass would be necessary to provide solar power for the US (and other countries/regions). It would take someone above my pay grade to critique it but what the heck, why aren't we thinking of radical solutions that clean it all up.

MAP

My critique would be that it will require more; maybe at least twice as much because of the way solar power works, not available at night, not much during a cloudy day etc. Similar problem to wind, it has to be blowing but when it is blowing there is too much! So how do we distribute it, how much over capacity. First and foremost though, we have to find a technology that scales.

Nonsense. Not enough water.

they're happy with non-potable or waste-water.

Read above 3 times all freshwater.

before I check it.

The only thing I didn't supply was the calculation from acre feet to gallons. It's easy to find. Figure (10 million acre feet / 12) or 1 inch evaporation per week because of evaporation. I've seen similar calculations to mine that came up with the same conclusion. The only difference is that I applied it to actual consumption of diesel and oil.

but for one thing, they don't need a limitless flow of fresh water - a basic reservoir can be re-cycled. Sunlight would provide the energy for reclamation through evaporation/distillation. Only loss would need to be topped off. It all depends on how you choose to build it, but it can be engineered at practically any degree of self-containment depending on how that works economically.

Its going to have to be very simple to scale. Building some kind of metal glass container that recycles water will work fine but that does not scale up to thousands of barrels much less millions. It will have to be very simple ponds of some kind with very still water for Algal growth but with sufficient nutrient circulation. Perhaps there is a yet to be engineered microbe that carries the nutrients to the Algae otherwise you have a very complex set of pumps and gadgets which is the mistake everyone is making. There are already some very fine systems that work, can be hauled around on the back of a truck, are self contained and use very little water and energy. They are nice science projects but they are not even close to being prototypes.

Mercury capsules to the Moon = less than two decades. For example, why metal and glass when thin Mylar might be fine? It's not like it needs to be pressurized or sealed - you decide what level of efficiency you want.

Coming up with a solution like big mylar bags is the kind of thing we need; I've been following this. There was a S. African company that claimed it could build a system that made 300K barrels a day. Fake. Still making that claim but really, so far, nada.

Technology doesn't always work the way we think it should. Maybe the moon was easy. The key thing that made me realize what we are up against is realizing how much energy is in a gallon of gas and how much petroleum accumulated over million of years of natural production. Vast amounts of time that are impossible to imagine. Nature put all this oil on the Earth, kind of like sugar for yeast, a dead-end eventually.

But since as far as we know we're the only creature in the entire history of living organisms that's actually pulled that "easy" task off - made it up and out of their planet's gravity well - I'd like to think we have a shot at being the first to lick the "what to do when you run out of energy" equation too.

We're swimming in energy. The planet is crawling with it - global warming is a surfeit of the damned stuff. The center of the planet is molten and glowing, the currents in the air and oceans are in constant motion, the tides churn every day, the sun shines on nearly 50% of the planet's surface every moment.

If we can't harness *any* of that to solve our problems, then IMO we'd have proven ourselves far too fucking stupid to live anyway.

That's the irony and nature has solved the renewable energy problem on its own. That's not the core problem. The core problem is that we learned to consume the concentrated elixir of energy from the ground and that allowed us to grow our population to ridiculously large proportions in a wasteful paradigm of energy usage. Now we have the problem of switching paradigms with a population that requires unreasonable scale.

To inject oil rich algae directly into a compression ignition (Diesel) engine as fuel without the intermediate processing steps.

That's a huge cost reduction.

The World's oil deposits were made by the Earth's oceans from Solar energy and Algae over 10s or hundreds of millions of years under pressures, temperatures and atmospheric conditions that are not entirely known. Diesel made from Petroleum is a very concentrated store of energy; more even than gasoline and several times that of ethanol.

Now we hear a proposal to manufacture a significant fraction of that energy as diesel year after year starting in just a few years. The idea that someone would bet the farm on a proposal like this is ludicrous. Proposals like this are fun to think about sometimes but are not serious because they do not propose a scalable system.

The most optimistic projection for bio-fuel production from Algae is 3000 us gallons per acre or about 55 barrels of diesel per acre each year or .15 barrels a day per acre.

The US used over 4 million barrels of diesel a day in 2007. Let's suppose that the US wanted to replace 25% of that diesel production or one million barrels of diesel a day with Algal diesel.

1,000,000/.15 = 6,666,666 acres. Well the devil is in the numbers isn't it? That does not account for energy return on energy investment or EROEI i.e., the energy costs to move water fertilizer and refining. Currently, the best estimate I could find for EROEI for algae diesel is 1.06 yikes we would need 130 million acres; more than all the irrigated farmland in the U.S. Let's pretend there are some scientific breakthroughs and 1.06 becomes 1.6 and we need only 10 million acres to produce our 1 million net barrels of Diesel per day.

So 10 million acres is equal to all of the irrigated farmland in California and California has the most irrigated cropland of any state and uses 11% of all the freshwater in the US on that farmland. Now we are going to need about an inch of water per acre per week to grow our Algae because that is how fast water evaporates in sunlight. So, we are proposing to use 3,356,500,000 gallons a day of water. The USA currently uses total: 346,000,000,000/365 = 947,945,205 gallons a day. So we are proposing to use more than three times the amount of all our freshwater in the USA to produce 25% of our diesel needs or 5% of our total petroleum consumption on an area the size of California's Central Valley. Of course we will need to make those scientific breakthroughs on our EROEI.

It's plans like this that make me crazy.

this technology does not have to be dispersed on land. It can be arrayed vertically. Sunlight and water are the operative ingredients not land. The arrays do not have to be placed on farmland or even on wetland.

You can find 10 million acres in the middle of Nevada but you will need 3 times all the freshwater used by the U.S. to replace only 5% of Petroleum consumption.

Noted. I am a huge proponent of solar.

EOM

All of a sudden, today, people are anywhere from miffed to pissed off that the president is not stepping in and taking over. This is deadly political territory.

This gave me an answer I'm looking for. Why the heck is BP picking the dispersant? That is so far around the bend, it is difficult to comprehend. We're the sovereign state, along with the others, that should make that decision. I simply can't believe the total wimp posture of the administration. Thanks for this.

That's great to hear. That's what everyone should be working toward right now. My wife and I are a mile from our offices, by choice. That makes a huge difference. Got a nice tax break for new windows and other fix its.

I see city living becoming a lot more appealing and "edge cities" in large metro areas, like around DC. I also think that the battery solution is the big pay off. We contribute so much to petroleum use and pay so much in terms of foreign involvements, transportation is the logical hit at 30% or so of the total energy consumption in the US.

There are other efforts just begging for a major demonstration like vertical farming in large cities. The transportation costs for produce are huge. The plans are in place. We ought to try one out.

This all cries out for major leadership, which I hope we'll see soon. Unfortunately, this is one instance where 'no pain, no gain' applies.