Generally speaking, I’m a live and let live kind of person. You believe what you want and I’ll believe what I want, we can engage in a civil discussion about it if you’d like, but that’s your choice. Here’s a warning, if you’re a religious person and you’re easily offended, don’t read this entry. Stop. Do not pass Go. Here’s something more soothing to read.
OK, you’re still reading. Then I take that as an invitation to depart from my live and let live stance to say that I’m coming to believe strongly that organized religion is one of the most evil influences at work in our society today; even factoring in all the good works that do come from religious individuals around care for the elderly, feeding the hungry, etc.
What is prompting this? I read two articles today that set my blood boiling (as just the latest examples TODAY of religion’s negative influence on society.) Item #1: A 14-year old boy refuses medical treatment for leukemia on the basis of religious objections to medical intervention. He died today. There is no reason for a person to refuse treatment on a religious basis – it’s tantamount to saying “Santa will leave me coal in my stocking if I was bad this year.” If this child didn’t want the treatment and preferred to die due to some rational reason (bad prognosis, substantially decreased quality of life post-treatment,) it would still be difficult to take, but it would at least be understandable. That people are making life and death decisions on pure bunk is outrageous and criminal.
Item #2: The Pope says atheism is responsible for “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice.” Last time I checked, there wasn’t an atheist cult demanding 10% of people’s income, threatening believers with eternal damnation for non-compliance with their interpretation of a contradictory set of rules set down by a compiled work of fiction, conscripting uneducated children to blow themselves and others up to gain entry to paradise, or ritually sexually abusing children due to their position of trust and power in the cult. I say this to you Pope Benedict-Arnold, “let he without sin cast the first stone.”
Just one day, Today, there are two stories demonstrating the evil and hypocrisy of religion. Tomorrow will bring more. Is it any wonder that thinking people, people who are responsible for their own actions, people who can tell the difference between good/evil, right/wrong, true/false are leaving organized religion in droves? There are spiritual aspects to life, but they don’t have to be, and really shouldn’t be regulated by these entities forcing Dennis Lindberg to make Custer decisions around his own life. It’s ludicrous.
I know a number of very decent, kind hearted, intelligent people who act responsibly though they participate in religion. Independently, I like and respect these people. I strongly suspect that these same people would be decent, kind hearted, generous, and responsible even in the absence of religion – though I don’t know if they know that.
In the aggregate, religion has got to go and go fast. It’s a cancer eating away at the core of our society cloaked in the word of “god.” It might be time for a holy war, the war to diminish the religious impact on society. To start, since Churches are, at heart, businesses, their tax deduction should be repealed immediately. I’m going to write my representatives about that… My tolerance for living in a society where hypocrisy is ingrained in society through religious cults is at an end.
I wish I had written this material on why I’m angry about religion, but thankfully, Greta Christina already wrote it and I can just link to it. It does a much more thorough and articulate job of communicating the outrage that is collecting around religion and “god.”
Tomorrow is the last week of regular college football action, this season has gone by in a flash. Of all the games tomorrow, two stand out with respect to the national championship picture, Missouri-Oklahoma (Big 12 Championship) and West Virginia-Pittsburgh (100th edition of the Backyard Brawl). The scenario is pretty simple, if both Missouri and West Virginia win, they will play for the national championship in January. If one of the teams lose, Ohio State will take their place in that game. If both teams lose, Ohio State and Georgia would likely play for the championship.
As much as I’d like to see Ohio State in the championship game (who doesn’t want to see their team play for all the marbles?) I can’t muster any righteous indignation to make a case that Ohio State deserves to be in the game more so than Missouri or West Virginia, if they win their games this weekend. Regardless of your position on the present system, everyone can agree that the ingredients to play in the championship game are well known: play an adult schedule (Hawaii 2007 and Auburn 2004), don’t lose late (Ohio State 2007 and Kansas 2007), and don’t lose more than one game (LSU 2007 and USC 2007).
I think it all comes down to expectation and perception at the end of the day. If you had come from the future and said to me “Ohio State will be 11-1, having lost one game by 7 points, and the team is headed to the Rose Bowl and still has a chance of making it to the championship game” in mid-August, I would have been overjoyed. Read my season preview for Ohio State if you don’t believe me. Want to know disappointment? What about USC and LSU? These teams were “mortal locks” to play for the championship in August (you can tell because the talking heads continue to make excuses for each team and continue with the perspective these teams would destroy any opponent they played at present – uh, not so much.)
So where does this leave us? Ohio State’s most likely destination is the Rose Bowl (gang, I see both Missouri and West Virginia taking care of business this weekend.) What in the world is wrong with that? USC is the most likely opponent, that will be a great game to see. In this most unusual of college football seasons, I take my hat off to the over-achieving Buckeyes (and Mountaineers, Tigers, and Rainbows.) However the bowls shake out, it should be interesting to see the results. And particularly, the results on Conference Strength.
This is the fourth entry in a series on Rebuilding America; what candidates ought address leading up to the 2008 election. The series includes: An Overview on Rebuilding America, an article on Core Values, and an article on how to Conclude the War in Iraq. Candidates, feel free to “steal” this platform…you could do worse than Rebuild America as the top level slogan and the initiatives proposed in this series as the mechanism to accomplish the goal.
Let’s not be abstract about this subject, energy makes the world go around. And that is particularly true in America. Set aside industry and the military for a moment, let’s make this personal. If you live in America, you drive. If you drive, you’ll notice that gasoline now costs, on average, over $3 per gallon. Yes, the price ebbs and flows, but if one observes the trend, the price is moving ever higher over time. What about your utility bill? Have you noticed any change in natural gas and/or electricity prices? The same factors are at work in this area, prices ebb and flow, but over time they are moving inexorably higher.
Why do prices go up? There is a permanent increasing demand for energy and a limited supply on a global basis. As long as more people appear on the earth and those people rely on fossil fuel as the base source for energy, the problem will continue to build hitting you in the pocket book. A more important question to ask is: Why is the energy issue core and important? Aside from the obvious economic impact of our energy demand, consumption, and supplies, is that our present situation drives a counter-productive foreign policy to ensure that America has access to these fossil fuel resources. This means that foreign governments effectively are calling the shots for America, and thus ultimately, for you.
Consider this sobering fact: America’s dependence on foreign oil has increased from 47% in 1977 to 66% in 2007. That’s a 19% increase in foreign dependence on oil over 30 years. Our foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East becomes crystal clear when this situation is considered.
In proposing an energy policy that realizes the national interest of energy independence and national security, one needs to segment the problem into Time (what do we do now, 10 years, 20 years) and what do we do across these segments: Transportation, Electricity Generation, and Conservation. Ultimately though, any energy policy needs to deliver these two outcomes:
Regardless of where one stands on the climate change issue, it would be a good thing to reduce the volume of CO2, NOx, and particulate matter emitted into the atmosphere. One only needs to travel to Los Angeles on a hot summer’s day to see the negative impact of these emissions at scale on overall quality of life for Americans. Reducing the emissions footprint can and should be a synergistic effect of an effective energy policy.
How do we achieve these goals when the DoE has been funded to the tune of $350B over 30 years and has failed? It’s simple really, establish focus on the solution, provide incentives for the right behavior, and redirect resources toward the desired outcomes. If you don’t like handing over an increasing percentage of your hard earned wages to support OPEC countries hellbent on the destruction of America through our addiction to oil, it behooves you to get behind a focused energy policy like the one outlined below.
American’s drive cars. American’s love to drive cars. American’s will drive cars until they can’t afford to drive cars any more – and still, American’s will find ways to drive cars. Are you getting the point? That means that we have to find a way to channel that love for cars (mobility and independence) into the solution. Things we should do now include:
In 10 years time, American’s will still drive cars but the vehicle’s efficiency and propulsion will be different than present day vehicles. These actions should serve to catalyze two actions: spur auto manufacturers to create products that allow consumers to win from a fuel perspective and provide incentives for consumers to choose products that, in aggregate, reduce fossil fuel demand over the next 10 years. These actions should also mobilize the biofuel industry in existence today and provide market demand that enables these manufacturers to move beyond corn for feedstock to sustain profitable production. Over this 10 year time period, the investment in R&D in electric propulsion vehicles should lay the foundation for a changeover from fossil/bio-fuels to a dominant electric vehicle transportation segment over a 20 year horizon.
By 2018, it will be time to adjust the policy to ensure that the transportation segment transitions from a primarily combustion propulsion industry to an electric propulsion industry:
If we commit ourselves to these activities, by 2028, the US ground transportation segment will be primarily electric and those combustion vehicles still in operation will have substantially higher fuel efficiency. It’s not unreasonable to believe that fossil fuel consumption will be curtailed sufficiently to turn America into a net exporter of oil at that time. You may note that the maritime and aviation industries are not mentioned in these actions, true. These policies and goals are directed toward the bulk of the problem and opportunity. There are clearly policies that would catalyze change in those segments as well, but the payoff is far less than the ground transportation segment overall. Americans will still drive cars, these cars will be substantially different than the ones driven in 2007 though.
Fine you say, but now all you’ve done is shift the demand from fossil fuel to electricity. You know where electricity comes from don’t you? In 2007, 50% is generated from coal fired plants, another 20% from natural gas and petroleum by-products, 20% from nuclear plants, 6% from gravity hydro, and 4% from the varied renewable energy sources. How do you solve that problem now having shifted the energy demand from fossil fuel to electricity? Are you going to build “clean coal” plants?
In order to have any kind of discussion about electricity generation and distribution, it’s necessary to understand the relative merits and risks of the various energy sources (they tend to be heat or kinetic in nature.) The present state-of-the-art involves using hydrocarbons (mostly coal, but some natural gas and petroleum products) to produce heat through combustion. The heat is then transferred to a working fluid (generally water) which vaporizes the fluid which in turn increases pressure which is used to spin turbines which are attached to generators. In a variation on theme, nuclear plants use a controlled fission reaction of nuclear material as the heat source in place of fossil fuel, other than the heat source, the harvest method is still a turbine. Solar thermal and geothermal plants use the heat of the sun and earth respectively to power their turbine connected generators.
Direct kinetic energy harvest is most mature in gravity hydro projects where the power of falling water is used to spin turbines connected to generators. Presently, the largest power plants on earth are gravity hydro in nature. Using a similar principal, wind mills use the kinetic energy of the winds to spin a prop (turbine) connected to a generator. Ocean mechanical harvest uses the power of the waves or tides to spin turbines by either trapping water behind barriers or using wave action energy converters.
Solar photovoltaic harvest uses sunlight to excite electrons in a special receptor (silicon or thin film chemical mixture) which are channeled to circuits, ganged together, and then either used as direct current on site or converted to alternating current and used on-site or shipped off to the grid. There are other experimental types of power generation under review now, but the options enumerated above are mature enough and sufficiently well known to help address the current 4 petawatt hours of electricity consumed each year in the US growing to over 9 petawatt hours of consumption by 2028.
In evaluating potential power sources it’s important to understand the relative merits, risks, and costs of each electricity source. Here are the highlights for each source enumerated below:
With this background now in hand, let’s get to the policy we should pursue now, in 10 years, and in 20 years. By 2018, we should strive to change our electricity generation from it’s present state to a future state of 10% renewable generation, 60% nuclear generation, 10% hydro generation, 10% natural gas generation, and 10% coal generation to produce the 6 petawatt hours of annual electricity production that will be required. Furthermore, we should work to increase the aggregate capacity factor of existing generation resources from the present 46% to 60% by 2018. Here are the aspects of the policy that should be put in force immediately and monitored through the US Department of Energy and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission:
The actions outlined above will catalyze the electric industry toward the right behaviors and will properly use government regulation and oversight as incentives and levers. A serendipitous outcome from this activity will be a balance of energy consumption by 2018 and reduced negative environmental impact to 1990 emissions levels (or below) while maintaining a standard of living, mobility, price, and comfort that the American public demands. Around 2018, the policy should be tweaked to change the portfolio to 50% nuclear, 30% renewable, 10% hydro, and no more than 10% fossil fuels for electricity generation of the over 9 petawatt hours that will be consumed in 2028.
By this time, the US will be in a position to be a net exporter of fossil fuels and a leader in renewable and nuclear power projects. Coupled with the transportation changes, our emissions levels will be at levels not seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution and our energy needs will be met by resources within our control obviating the need to involve the country in the Middle East to protect fossil fuel reserves. The economy will be significantly stimulated due to job creation in the transportation and electricity generation segments and by the currency’s tendency to stay in the US now that oil imports have ceased.
The increase in consumption from 4 to 9 petawatts is modeled on a 4% annual increase in consumption across that time period. In order to achieve that, certain conservation actions will need to be enacted to contain the growth in consumption to those rates.
Similar to the observation that American’s like to drive espoused in the Transportation segment, American’s don’t like to conserve. They’re allergic to the very notion because it means they’re giving something up that they value. Ultimately, the one place American’s understand is the pocketbook. People will drive 10 miles to save $0.03/gallon on gasoline. It’s this part of the psyche that must be tapped to conserve electricity. Over the next 20 years, a few simple things will help tap into that reserve and take the edge off of electricity consumption, they are:
These actions will, over 20 years and across 300 million Americans take the edge off electricity consumption even as reliance on electricity increases due to the shift from fossil fuels to electricity as the fuel for transportation.
This is an enormously long entry, and if you’ve actually read this far, congratulations. It’s clear that these areas, transportation, electricity generation, and conservation are connected. It’s equally clear that our current policies are failing miserably in this area (question: how did we spend $350B of our money over 30 years for the Department of Energy and increase your fossil fuel dependence by 20%?) But, if we were to get behind them, even with the problems they would cause, we would have a situation where:
You may not agree with the specific actions proposed, but I hope that you can see there are specific and targeted actions we can take now that will shape our collective future. One thing I think is universally true and understood is that the current course and speed does not lead us to where we need to be. Contribute your $0.02 in the comments section of you’d like.
