Manhattan Project of the 21st Century....

[5.56X45mm]

We as a nation are addicted to oil. Not just any oil..... but foreign oil. We need to kick the stuff. But how can we do this you ask? Simple. We do and here is how we'll do it.

1. The United States needs to build more Nuclear Power Plants. Most of our electricity comes from coal or oil buring power plants. Nuclear Power is safe and cheap compaired to oil. Coal is not an issue with the United States of America since we are the coal producing center for the world.

2. We must start drilling our own oil sources. We have know sources of oil located in coastal waters of Florida and the other Southern States plus oil in Alaska. The hippies/commies/greens say that having us drill for it will be bad for the environment. So we're not drilling but Communist China is drilling off the coast of Florida. My home state.... Communist China, the country that still uses lead based paints for children's toys and poisoned pet food and tooth paste.

3. We must form an economic partnership with Canada. They have a huge supply of oil that can be recovered from Oil Shale. Canada has more oil in it's Oil Shale then the entire Middle East.

4. We must start using alternative enegry sources such as wind power. But we must also drop the NIMBY idea. NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard. Such famous Liberal/Communist Democrats such as Senator Ted Kennedy has displayed NIMBY when they were going to place Wind Turbines to produce electricity around Martha's Vineyard. He said no because he didn't want them in his backyard. Yet Ted Kenedy stuck to the idea of NIMBY when we claims to be an environmentalist.

5. For fuel we must not use ethonal. Ethanol is nothing but a fool's dream. Ethanol has a lower BTU output, which means that to produce the same amount as enegry as 87 octane gasoline you must use more ethanol. Also it rises the price of food. We are using our corn crops for fuel instead of food. Corn that would go to feeding humans and animals such as cows. Cows that produce milk and meat. Along with every other animal that eats corn. Guess what.... every farm animal that we eat eats corn. Not a good idea to burn our food.

6. We must build more oil refineries. We haven't built any since the 1970s. Oil Refineries convert crude oil into useful fuels like gasoline. One of the reason for such high prices in fuel is supply and demand. Both OPEC and our own faults. OPEC will only release a certain amount of oil on the market thus keeping the prices and and since we have such a small refining capacity we can only release such a small amount of fuels on our markets. The Hippies/Communist/Greens are to blame for the lack of refineries. It's because of their environmental policies that we're in the this. If we can refine more crude into useful fuel then prices will drop.

7. We must have the government support a Manhattan type project for a hybrid vehicle that produces the same amount of power and usefulness as a vehicle of today. When I mean a Manhattan type project, I mean that the government and the American Automobile Industry needs to get together and start bumping heads and generating ideas. Electric cars will not work because you cannot recharge a battery as fast as filling up a fuel tank. Also don't make them look gay.

And in the end.....

I believe that we must stop taking blind faith in "Global Warming". In fact it is nothing but a myth. Al Gore did not invite the internet but he sure as hell did invite Global Warming. If we limit ourselves in our industrial capacity to stop Global Warming then all we will do is hurt ourselves because Communist China will not stop it's industrial capacity.

In fact the history of Earth's climate is proven to be a roller coaster. It has it's ups and it's downs. We have gone through multiple warming and cooling periods. Numorus scientists has proven that man is not a cuase for the general warming that people think if happing. The Antartica's western ice sheet is melting and that is what all of the hippies tell us is a sign of global warming yet what they don't tell you is that the eastern ice sheet is growing and the reason for the melting is geothermal heat under the western ice sheet is rising. This is just one of many signs that Global Warming is not happening. For more information go here. Global Warming - The Greatest Lie since Communism

I am all for protecting the environment for ourselves and our future generations. But this Global Warming idea is being taken on such blind faith to the same level that the peasants in Russia took the belief of Soviet Communism as a Godsend.

 

[justin1552]

Very interesting points, 5.56. Some of them I haven't even thought about and others I never even heard of (NIMBY). I think what you have here should be taken to the whitehouse and be put into action. I especially agree with point 5, 6, and 7. Even more so with not making the cars look gay. :bravo:

 

[MontyB]

Or you could just spend the money you would be wasting on refineries for a depleted and expensive resource and putting it into a developing a cheaper alternative such as fuel cells.
In most cases the problem is not that the world is out of oil it is that the remaining oil is not easily accessible or of a lower grade which means that it will cost more to extract and refine however once prices reach a point where it is cost effective to tap them I am sure they will be extracted and you will pay for it at rates set by the international market.

However as this is just another message to appeal to reactionaries that every poorly educated hot head with the "why isn't someone fixing my problems" mentality will leap to support its probably not worth getting into in depth.

I do love how the whole argument dissolves into a rant on communism, Al Gore and global warming though I would however go for full coverage of the fringe groups and throw something in there about the the threat of Islam.

But just one question:
What if Canada doesn't to give you its oil, maybe they will want to sell to the highest bidder or maybe they just want to keep it for themselves?

 

[The Other Guy]

With the overall thesis, I agree. I'll just comment on this one.

2. We must start drilling our own oil sources. We have know sources of oil located in coastal waters of Florida and the other Southern States plus oil in Alaska. The hippies/commies/greens say that having us drill for it will be bad for the environment. So we're not drilling but Communist China is drilling off the coast of Florida. My home state.... Communist China, the country that still uses lead based paints for children's toys and poisoned pet food and tooth paste.

China, the country with one of the highest pollution rates in the world. Do we really want to follow their lead?

 

[Del Boy]

I believe this is a good thesis. Certainly the greatest scare -mongering is the global warming industry. We are but an irrelevance in the face of our planet, which controls itself regardless of us. We are far too puny to affect it, and should direct our efforts to making practical efforts such as those suggested.

As they say in the tropics - necessity is the mother of invention. Pressing forward into the future is the only option, not turning back.

Nice post 5.56.

 

[major liability]

The solution has been here for 30 years. But the power companies are too comfy to do anything about it.

Build more nuclear power plants (preferably using fuel beads rather than rods, so a meltdown becomes an impossibility), build a hydrogen plant next to each new nuclear plant and get the damn oil companies to start putting hydrogen infrastructure in their stations NOW. I read an article on /. about a year ago about this invention that would allow about twice the hydrogen to be stored with the same amount of volume thanks to some sort of nanoscale lattice that compresses its molecular structure. That solves just about the only problem with hydrogen fueled cars. And we've had car engines that run on hydrogen since the 60s.

 

[Del Boy]

Another good post. I'd buy that. I also understand that the production of such methods , and the necessary technology, has been an available possibility to the big companies for a great deal of time , but they have not been prepared to go there. That was my reference to 'necessity being the mother of invention' (my last post). And America, as the greatest country in the world, and as the only real leaders into the future, and the most optimistic and pressing we have to show, are just the guys for the job. Brush aside all the political cant, we are overloaded with that, but we have allways had only a few 'make it happenners'.

USA - make it happen.

 

[MontyB]

The solution has been here for 30 years. But the power companies are too comfy to do anything about it.

Build more nuclear power plants (preferably using fuel beads rather than rods, so a meltdown becomes an impossibility), build a hydrogen plant next to each new nuclear plant and get the damn oil companies to start putting hydrogen infrastructure in their stations NOW. I read an article on /. about a year ago about this invention that would allow about twice the hydrogen to be stored with the same amount of volume thanks to some sort of nanoscale lattice that compresses its molecular structure. That solves just about the only problem with hydrogen fueled cars. And we've had car engines that run on hydrogen since the 60s.

It sounds a damn sight more sensible than building more refineries when you don't have a fuel shortage, but there is little doubt that Hydrogen is the way to go.
The only real issue is finding a way around the Power and Oil company intransigence which really is something only government can do.

 

[Infern0]

if you guys haven't seen it, try track down a docu-movie call "who killed the electric car", it really change my perception on alternative fuels

 

[Team Infidel]

Interesting perspectives 5.56....

 

[A Can of Man]

I've been for the whole alternative to fossile fuels thing for a long time now.
Yeah I don't know if the whole global warming thing has enough evidence now either and in fact, I think the rising temperature probably has more to do with the urban heat island effect (which is real). A lot of temperature gathering stations are in populated areas (hey, would you want to work out in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from civilization just to check a damn thermometer??) and the thing is, cities are just prone to being hotter for multiple reasons.
But I think reducing oil to roles such as making asphalt and plastics (still a huge industry) and making automobiles and powerplants run on something else is very important. If not for the environment, for the sake of adverting some wars in the future.
Unfortunately, nuclear power plants are not the answer because of this simple reason: most of the accessable uranium sources have been either tapped or they are in Russia and the Russians are not going to sell uranium, rather they will sell energy which means it's going to cost a friggin' fortune (means big bucks for them).
I'm in agreement with almost everything else.

 

[Infern0]

i'll take issue with a cople of things here;


yes heat islands are real, that explanation does not account for the ice cap & glacial melting trends that have been documented. and bear in mind that glaciers and ice caps ARE the barometer for the planet

australia has all the uranium we should ever need i dare say....them and south africa too i believe?

 

[major liability]

Sometimes people are concerned about what we'll do with all that nuclear waste. I say we pick a launch site very far away from any developed area (in case a rocket explodes) and shoot the stuff into the sun or in a random direction out to space.

 

[MontyB]

Sometimes people are concerned about what we'll do with all that nuclear waste. I say we pick a launch site very far away from any developed area (in case a rocket explodes) and shoot the stuff into the sun or in a random direction out to space.

Hehe and with our luck we would hit the only inhabited planet in the galaxy.

i'll take issue with a cople of things here;


yes heat islands are real, that explanation does not account for the ice cap & glacial melting trends that have been documented. and bear in mind that glaciers and ice caps ARE the barometer for the planet

australia has all the uranium we should ever need i dare say....them and south africa too i believe?

The funny thing is that even if the "there is no global warming" crowd are correct it is all irrelevant because the simple fact is that oil usage is increasing rapidly as nations develop and it doesn't matter what reserves we have now they will be depleted in a short time, yet as you have seen by the original post that it is far more important to blame Al Gore and the Chinese than to actually do something about it.

I find it amusing that anyone could believe that building oil refineries is the answer to high oil costs when the reality of a finite comodity indicates that the price can only go up, the only answer to this problem is to remove the need for oil anything else is at best (because of the finite supply) short term and short sighted.

 

[A Can of Man]

There's always a pessimist that s*its on everything!

 

[ASTRALdragon]

1. The United States needs to build more Nuclear Power Plants. Most of our electricity comes from coal or oil buring power plants. Nuclear Power is safe and cheap compaired to oil. Coal is not an issue with the United States of America since we are the coal producing center for the world.

I agree with you 200%. Considering the most reliable scientific studies to date, the pros of nuclear power far outweigh the cons.

2. We must start drilling our own oil sources. We have know sources of oil located in coastal waters of Florida and the other Southern States plus oil in Alaska. The hippies/commies/greens say that having us drill for it will be bad for the environment. So we're not drilling but Communist China is drilling off the coast of Florida. My home state.... Communist China, the country that still uses lead based paints for children's toys and poisoned pet food and tooth paste.

I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with this statement. Yes, we do need to start coming up with our own oil reserves but at the same time we cannot go screwing up our national parks and whatnot. I'd hate to lose Yellowstone or the majestic Alaskan mountains for a few million barrels of oil which we as a nation would probably use up in a week. Sacrifice everlasting natural beauty for a month's supply of oil for the nation.... not a good trade imho.

3. We must form an economic partnership with Canada. They have a huge supply of oil that can be recovered from Oil Shale. Canada has more oil in it's Oil Shale then the entire Middle East.

Extracting oil from oil shale is too expensive, and the amount it would produce in comparison to extracting it from crude as we do today is not even half.

4. We must start using alternative enegry sources such as wind power. But we must also drop the NIMBY idea. NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard. Such famous Liberal/Communist Democrats such as Senator Ted Kennedy has displayed NIMBY when they were going to place Wind Turbines to produce electricity around Martha's Vineyard. He said no because he didn't want them in his backyard. Yet Ted Kenedy stuck to the idea of NIMBY when we claims to be an environmentalist.

Agreed.

5. For fuel we must not use ethonal. Ethanol is nothing but a fool's dream. Ethanol has a lower BTU output, which means that to produce the same amount as enegry as 87 octane gasoline you must use more ethanol. Also it rises the price of food. We are using our corn crops for fuel instead of food. Corn that would go to feeding humans and animals such as cows. Cows that produce milk and meat. Along with every other animal that eats corn. Guess what.... every farm animal that we eat eats corn. Not a good idea to burn our food.

Agreed. Using ethanol is an even worse idea than the oil shale one. The amount of ethanol needed to replace or even supplement oil would definitely shake up our agricultural economy.

6. We must build more oil refineries. We haven't built any since the 1970s. Oil Refineries convert crude oil into useful fuels like gasoline. One of the reason for such high prices in fuel is supply and demand. Both OPEC and our own faults. OPEC will only release a certain amount of oil on the market thus keeping the prices and and since we have such a small refining capacity we can only release such a small amount of fuels on our markets. The Hippies/Communist/Greens are to blame for the lack of refineries. It's because of their environmental policies that we're in the this. If we can refine more crude into useful fuel then prices will drop.

If we're trying to get off oil, then why are we building more oil refineries. It's like telling your kid to quit smoking but you keep giving him lighters and ash trays. The U.S. actually has the best oil refineries in the world. They produce the most barrels of oil per day compared to other nations.

Check out this list. The U.S. has states that dominate half the list. Now if you add them up as a nation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries

7. We must have the government support a Manhattan type project for a hybrid vehicle that produces the same amount of power and usefulness as a vehicle of today. When I mean a Manhattan type project, I mean that the government and the American Automobile Industry needs to get together and start bumping heads and generating ideas. Electric cars will not work because you cannot recharge a battery as fast as filling up a fuel tank. Also don't make them look gay.

I think we as a nation have other issues right now... (e.g. falling dollar value, economic recession, growing national debt, etc.). We need money first before we can fund research. What good will the research do if we fund it one year but skip the next two years?

I believe that we must stop taking blind faith in "Global Warming". In fact it is nothing but a myth. Al Gore did not invite the internet but he sure as hell did invite Global Warming. If we limit ourselves in our industrial capacity to stop Global Warming then all we will do is hurt ourselves because Communist China will not stop it's industrial capacity.

In fact the history of Earth's climate is proven to be a roller coaster. It has it's ups and it's downs. We have gone through multiple warming and cooling periods. Numorus scientists has proven that man is not a cuase for the general warming that people think if happing. The Antartica's western ice sheet is melting and that is what all of the hippies tell us is a sign of global warming yet what they don't tell you is that the eastern ice sheet is growing and the reason for the melting is geothermal heat under the western ice sheet is rising. This is just one of many signs that Global Warming is not happening. For more information go here. Global Warming - The Greatest Lie since Communism

I am all for protecting the environment for ourselves and our future generations. But this Global Warming idea is being taken on such blind faith to the same level that the peasants in Russia took the belief of Soviet Communism as a Godsend.

I still believe that there is not enough evidence to prove OR disprove global warming. The Earth could still be in the Ice Age at the moment and we are just experiencing a warming trend, but then again, we could be horribly wrong. Never in the history of the Earth has it had so much greenhouses gases emitted into the already weakening ozone layer. We may have possibly beat out Mother Earth's own defenses in only a fraction of the time of her existence...

 

[Del Boy]

We may have possibly beat out Mother Earth's own defenses in only a fraction of the time of her existence...

Good post.

I understand that, because we merely scratch the surface of our planet, we are fairly irrelevant. The earth has such powerful layers of balances etc. that adjustments come certainly and automatically as required. We cannot kill this planet, Mother Nature doesn't know we exist to any degree. Even insects have a greater role, do they not?

However, what that says about protecting ourselves is an entirely different matter. Much we are incapable of affecting, but our talent is supposed to be for ingenuity and drive. But we must be concentrating on the positive, the future, and the speed of development. Roll with it, not try to hold it back.

First thing then,seems to me, is out with oil and in with sustainable fuel.
That should be do-able, when push comes to shove, short term. I believe is a project to be USA led, driven and put into place.

I can see that guys are already onto it! The planet will take care of itself, whatever, us staying alive is the project.

Yes, I know this is all old-hat. Just reminding myself and whistling nervously.

 

[A Can of Man]

People often seem to skip the whole thing about the Ozone layer. This has been proven has it not?

 

[senojekips]

I read that last year (2007) the hole in the ozone layer was the smallest it's been in about 20 years. http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20020926ozonehole.html

This was in spite of the panic merchants telling us about ten years ago that even if we gave up all CFCs etc., it would continue to grow for at least 50 years. Obviously something that can recover to this extent in a 12 month period is not being affected by man's intervention.

And people wonder why I distrust "experts".

 

[A Can of Man]

Thanks for that information.
Geez... you wonder if any of that environmental stuff is true.