Free At Last

foreverWhat an absolutely worthless article with an utterly misleading title. Indeed, just a bunch of spew.

Everyone should make themselves aware of the suppression of alternative energy, many inventors which have worked on claimed alternative if not free energy machines / devices who have not been able to get their machine out for a variety of reasons, untimely deaths are one of them. I bring attention to two (below) here but remember, there is a PATTERN of untimely deaths, not limmited to these two, that should raise an eyebrow at least...

Stanley Meyers water fuel cell. Died of a heart attack at the age of 57 after appealing a fraud


"Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution - Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system "
"Daniel G. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, has developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas, a discovery that paves the way for large-scale use of solar power"

Obama should be funneling 10 billion into the MIT discovery, not investing in Chrysler.
What a worthless article this is and utterly misleading title. Indeed, just a bunch of spew.

Everyone should make themselves aware of the suppression of alternative energy such as...

Stanley Meyers - inventor water fuel cell - in 1990 it strongly appears that he was unfairly declared guilty of fraud - unfair because the case was under national security review and the witnesses that were supposed to testify were blocked, and that was just the beginning of the highly suspicious actions of court cases that took place over the course of the following 6 years. he died of a heart attack in 98.

Arie M. DeGeus - free energy battery - inventor of a revolutionary, affordable, clean energy technology, of AMDG Scientific Corp was found slumped in his car, totally unresponsive, and later was pronounced dead.

"Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution - Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system "
"Daniel G. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, has developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas, a discovery that paves the way for large-scale use of solar power"

Obama should be funneling 10 billion into the MIT discovery, not investing in Chrysler.

Until we learn that technology is not a toy that will allow us to fulfill our fantasy du jour, this talk about reducing our energy needs is just a crock. In the energy crisis of the '70's (you older guys know -- the moral equivalent of war), the government looked to technology to reduce energy use by mandating improved efficiency for major appliances in the home. And we saw substantial improvements in the efficiency of everything from air conditioners and furnaces, to water heaters and TV's and insulation. So we bought bigger houses -- more efficient houses for sure -- but houses that ate up all the technical gains to allow us to put fewer people in more living space. In the end, no net reductions in residential energy use.

The history of improvements in automobile efficiency is the same story. From 1980 to the present cars have become bigger, more powerful and faster. According to data available from the Energy Information Agency, if the cars we drive weighed the same and accelerated the same as cars in 1980, the technology we developed would reduce fuel consumption by 20 or so percent. If we drove the same number of miles per capita that we drove we would reduce fuel consumption by an other 30 or so percent. And the problem is not solely attributable to SUV's and increased commuting. Cars across the entire spectrum are bigger and heavier than in 1980 and a majority of the increased miles are discretionary recreational miles -- not commuting miles. Great technology gains. And every time we realize them we find new and creative ways to squander their true value.

Technology provides us great hope. But our fantasy that technology will change things so we will not have to change ourselves is simply a pipedream. We may free ourselves from the yoke of imported oil with electric cars -- cars whose batteries are made from materials like lithium which comes from South America. Or nickel which we don't produce either. We may develop something like cold fusion which requires precious metals like palladium which comes mostly from Russia. We were persuaded that we could get energy from our farms. And we are discovering that it will come at the cost of reducing our ability to grow food, will result in more chemicals being introduced into the environment and indirectly result in the depletion of finite groundwater resources which will surely be gone even before the oil runs out.

But there is no technology which will reduce our reliance on other countries and/or reduce the prospects of environmental problems which will work without our willingness to change ourselves.

Fareed spews but never has anything intelligent to say

There is a series starting tonight on the History Channel called Life After People:

http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/04/life-after-people-movie.html

It underscores how serious Fareed's subject is.

There is a simple answer here that no one seems to realize... population control. It could solve a lot of problems, but people always dismiss it... I suppose because it denies a basic human right. A planet with 9 billion people is going to be miserable. A sorry state of existence.

Why no mention of fourth-generation nuclear technology such as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) as part of the solution? IFR technology produces clean energy by using existing stocks of nuclear waste as fuel. The process consumes nearly all of the radioactive material, leaving low volumes of waste material that require containment periods measured in decades rather than millennia. The U.S. had a functioning IFR at the Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho Falls that was scrapped by a short-sighted congress in 1994 despite showing success over an extended testing period. There is sufficient fuel to power widespread use of IFR facilities for thousands of years. We have the technology to address some of the greatest challenges of our time ??? clean energy production, CO2 emissions and reduction of nuclear waste material ??? all in one package. All we need are leaders who will step forward to make it happen.

I think your calculations are off. For China and India to approach parity with the US in lifestyle theis planet will need about six times the amount of oil we consume today.
Should this change our thinking? I think wars and terror is small potatoes to the problems we will face if we don't have an alternative working ASAP that can be sold/given to Asia.

I think your calculations are off. For China and India to approach parity with the US in lifestyle theis planet will need about six times the amount of oil we consume today.
Should this change our thinking? I think wars and terror is small potatoes to the problems we will face if we don't have an alternative working ASAP that can be sold/given to Asia.

I think this article is unmistakably biased (specially for the unnecessary discussion of the beginning), and I???m wondering if ???articles??? like the one just expose should be ONLY exposed in an OPINION column.

Let's do some simlple math here. If we cut our out energy consumption in half yet double our population, what progress have we made? Worldwide distribution of free condoms and birth-control pills, coupled with financial incentives for using them (e.g., tax credits for NOT having more than two children), would be cheaper, safer, and more enivironmentally sound than building more nuclear power plants or going to war over oil.

Fareed Zakaria writes: "If we are going to sustain and support this kind of population and economic growth, we'll need everything," meaning all possible means of energy, especially "clean and green". Why not address the root cause of population growth directly, by trying to prevent it, by trying to stabilize the world populationat the very least, rather than srambling for costly ways of cutting carbon, blah blah blah, I can't BELIEVE this was not addressed in the article, or the book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded". Unbridled growth is cancer.

Another possibility might be to not crowd the earth with 10 billion people. With less people the strain on the planet's resources would be less, and there would be less waste to deal with. If birth control were universally available that would go a long way towards helping this situation.

this all sounds way too rational for the united states to implement. i really wish that comment was sarcastic, but between the drug war, the iraq war, bailouts for perpetrators of massive fraud, domestic surveillance, intelligent design in schools, george bush's re-election, gas-guzzling suv's, and the like, we're really not doing so great at living up to the founding fathers' enlightenment ideals of social progress through reason and education...

Probably another source of "clean energy could be found into the oceans of this planet; by installing turbines coupled to waterproof generators at the right deppness, as all our oceans have strong currents of known curse, varing directions, deeppneses and temperatures. Studing this eveentually we could use those currents for good

There is may be another "clean" source for energy: This planet has oceans, and all those oceans have strong currents of knonw deppness, course, temperature and varing directions. Installing the right class of turbines coupled to waterfroof generators could provide cheap electricity to avoid burning fuels, gas, coal, bio-fuels. Is there someone investigating thease ?