The Lightning
Ok, I read it. Whatsit mean? That we really should have blood for oil wars? Or is he being uber subtle and not bothering to mention that we’ve got huge numbers of boots on the ground, ships in the water, and planes in the air all over the world’s biggest oil producing area already?? Cuz, ya know, one positive thing never ever mentioned to our long term occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and our rather large Joint Task Force East Africa, is the underlying “strategery” Chimpy laid down. We may not “own” the oil, but ain’t nobody else can have any if we say no. If we did a little payback for the USS Cole and occupied Yemen, we’d have the whole damn place sewed up tight.
And if push really came to shove, Mexico would have no one else to sell their product to. Hugo has no pipelines so he has to ship his stuff through our own private lake. All we have to do is run a line of ships along the windward islands and nothing gets in or out of the Carribean without our say so.
No surprise Russia is drilling the Lomonosov Ridge up in the Arctic Ocean as fast as they can, but if Global Worming reverses itself due to the current lack of sunspots, then the whole place will ice up again in a couple years. Hope Canada is doing similar, tout suite!
Great point I had not really considered before.
Posted by Paul "No Fear" Weir
10/23/2007 at 09:14 PM
I disagree with his take on “low yield"n especially when it comes to geothermal.
This is another one of those places where I think economic control by certain folks has moved heaven and earth to keep us from truly exploiting an incredible resource.
Think of all of the oil, coal, and natural gas that could be freed up for other uses if we could replace 10%, 20%, 50%, or maybe all of our electrical generation resources with a source that is totally ours, easy to exploit, abundant, and will outlast mankind.
There are a number of places in this country where we have enormous hotspots beneath our feet. The 2 largest are at Yellowstone and at Long Valley Caldera in California. Thousands of square miles of land where it is so hot that all you have to do is drill 2 holes that intersect a thousand or so feet down, pump water in one side, collect the steam thru a turbine on the other side, condense the water and reuse it. The magma plume around Yellowstone might be big enough all by itself to produce virtually all of the elctricity for the whole US. We don’t even have to intrude on very much of the Park as the bulk of the plume is actually outside of the western border.
No fuel is used, no pollution of any sort is produced, we don’t have to figure out what to do with expended reactor fuel, and we don’t give any money to any camel-fornicating, towel-wearing, pork-conceived, dogspawn or to any banana-and-gerbil-stuffing, rapine, murderous babboons from South America. The best of all things.
"Control the Lightning” - that’s a quote from the Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle book “Lucifer’s Hammer”. Only a geek would know that.
Geothermal - fine in theory. But it would involve turning the whole country into something resembling the Microsoft pipes screensaver.
You’d only have a bunch of piping in the areas around southwestern Yellowstone and Long Valley Caldera. As most of the water would be recyled you wouldn’t need a lot of water collection arrays. You’d also have a bunch of electrical lines leading away from them to connect up with the national networks.
That would be a small cost compared to what we’d gain by getting rid of all of the fuel-based generator facilities. We could keep all of our coal and oil to use for fuel for our cars, planes, ships, and the military. We could even have enough of an abundance of cheap electricity to make using service stations to recharge electric cars a feasible proposition. Also, as you need a lot of electricity to make hydrogen it would significantly decrease the cost of hydrogen fuel for cars. I think this is a win-win situation for everyone.
10/26/2007 at 04:52 AM
