2 Responses

1. ask Obama and the democrates this not here. the latest bailout money includes 1% of the total funds for green jobs. LET ME REPEAT this, just 1% or less than $8 billion. This won;t even touch such things as infrastructure.

   NO, lets get to your specific items. The air car is another fraud, it consumes more energy than an electric car, so no way. H2, another dream thing. Since there is NOT ONE molecule of H2 on the earth, man has to make it at a great inefficiency.

   Competitive, you need to take a class on what this means before you make blanket false statements. The average US citizen doesn’t want a prius, they are inefficient and cost to much, they are not competitive. the Big 3 make the highest fuel mileage cars in the world, BUT YOUR CONGRESSMAN and YOUR EPA won’t allow them in the US.

2. The US has been running a deficit budget ever since Bush came into power. The money isn’t hard earned, it’s just printed, how else can something like the Iraq war be financed? The deficit is over 10 trillion dollars and is expected to grow by two trillion dollars this year.

   The bailout of the banks is because virtually every business in the States pays salaries out of business loans and then pay off the loans with the revenue received from the work performed. The banks weren’t lending anything out in case they had to pay off on credit default swaps which thanks to a bill from a Republican Texas Senator that Democrat Clinton signed into power in 1999, were unregulated by law hence the banks found themselves not only unprepared for the liability but had no clear tally of their total liabilities hence they weren’t lending anything out cause they didn’t know how much they actually had. One can only surmise that Clinton had something else on his mind or rather on his “head” thereby not being in a position to effectively argue against the deregulation.

   The relationship between sub prime mortgages and the Credit Default Swaps is that the securities backed by sub-prime mortgages could be promoted from the status of junk to AAA by purchasing credit defaults swaps on them hence guaranteeing the securities by then reputable companies. The collapse is due to the “reputable” companies announcing that they really couldn’t guarantee the securities like they said they would and everyone having to revise their balance sheets and write off the assets. Only 4% of the mortgages have actually defaulted so far.

   If you’ve ever taken Engineering Control Systems Theory and truly appreciated it then you would know that exponential growth followed by catastrophic collapse is a direct result of deregulation (analyzing such an economic control system is an actual text book exercise since 1936).

   By bailing out the banks, the government encouraged them to lend again so all the other businesses in America could pay the salaries, otherwise a lot of people would be out of a job even though their business was profitable.

   With the auto companies, the entire concept of the factory production line allowed for otherwise poorly skilled labor to make decent salaries hence a huge segment of America could have decent paying jobs. If the auto companies don’t get bailed out, a huge number of people would loose their jobs often in regions dominated by the auto industry hence not only would they be poorly qualified for alternate employment, there wouldn’t be alternate employment in their vicinity.

   Investing in a green infrastructure creates new jobs for qualified people, it does nothing to help the millions who would loose their jobs, finding themselves without the qualifications and in the wrong part of the country to get a “green” job.

   The bailouts aren’t right but if they don’t occur, the consequence to all Americans and indeed the world economy will be quite devastating. Will it be enough? No one knows, it took massive deficit spending and depopulation from the second world war to end the depression, the infrastructure expenditures such as the Hoover dam only slowed down the depression.

   Hydrogen is a terrible alternate fuel, although it’s energy density by mass is fantastic, it has terribly low energy density by volume and being the second smallest molecule (monoatomic Helium is the smallest), it’s very difficult to contain, that is any container that you make will leak. Even compressed, it takes far more space to store an equivalent amount of energy in hydrogen than with gasoline. Plus compressed gases require pressure vessels which are inherently heavy and inherently dangerous and compressed air as an energy storage device also has the dangers of compressed gases, the weight penalty of compressed gases and only contains the energy of the physical compression, there’s no additional chemical energy stored in compressed air so at best it’s just a temporary reservoir of energy much as a capacitor would be. If you believe hydrogen or compressed air can compete with hydrocarbon fuels, then you’ve been mislead.

   The best energy storage mechanism for vehicles will likely be using Fischer Tropsch reactions to form liquid hydrocarbons from syn gas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide in a two to one ratio) obtained from using solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear power to obtain hydrogen and carbon monoxide from CO2 and water. Yes, that means the best alternatives to gasoline and diesel will be gasoline and diesel obtained by synthesis instead of refinement of fossilized hydrocarbons.

   Syngas (H2 and CO) can also be obtained by gasification of coal, natural gas or bio-mass. Yes bio-mass is garbage so you can make gasoline and diesel from garbage. The DoD awarded a contract for mobile units to do just this from Diversified Energy and Velocys back in 2007. Synthetic fuels date back to the early 1900’s and was down commercially by WWII Germany when embargoed, by South Africa’s Sasol corporation again due to an embargo and by the US Air Force. Also Shell synthesizes diesel at their GTL plant.

   Hydrogen and compressed air is only for those who can’t do the math.

   Interestingly, progress with synthetic fuels has been quietly been coming from the defense department, unnoticed by the coffee cooler self proclaimed green expert. Heeding the “wisdom” of the “pop” green experts would just divert funds to efforts that may sound good but don’t actually make any sense like corn ethanol. Leave the engineering to the engineers. Interestingly both post war Marshall (US army corps of Engineers) Germany (a text book example of control system theory applied to a national economy) and the current economic crisis suggests that we may be better off to leave economics to the engineers instead of bankers and brokers.