Cosmic War on Earth for the Killing of the Rising Solar, Wind & Other Renewable Energy Electric Industries & the 2nd Killing of the Electric Car -- Solar Energy is Star Energy
Let the drill-baby-drill, spill-pollute-and-kill, Neanderthals stuck on stupid stay there and sink in their fossil-fuels tar pit of outdated technology, as the new technology of starlight power rises and resplendently shines, indeed: Solar Power.
Are these talk-show hosts, guests, and touring public speakers, who are advocating for "big government" support for natural gas and highly expensive (at taxpayers' expense) nuclear sourced energy dominance in the energy market, really the hypocritical anti-big-government but self-proclaimed profit-motive free-marketplace libertarian, Wall Street and pro-traditional big-business conservative Republican lobbyists for the financial balance sheets and bottom lines of the profit-and-loss statements, and stock values and dividend earnings, of the status-quo big fossil-fuels and nuclear industries? Of course!
They want big government to patronize, subsidize and promote their business and investment interests in the name, and under the guise, of acting in the national interest and out of a sense of patriotism. They are unconscionable, insatiably gluttonous financial vampires and money maggots. Let natural gas cars and nuclear electrical power plants compete in their conservative Republican and libertarian free marketplace with the invisible hand of Darwinian natural selection, in supply-demand capitalism, picking the winners on a level playing field, at their own expense, with their competitors' businesses and not be advantaged with state socialism in assistance and patronage of their own businesses, at taxpayers' expense and the expense of their competitors -- the socialism for the poor and middle class Americans (when it comes to public education, unemployment benefits, Social Security pensions, Medicare health care for the elderly, national health care insurance for all Americans, including children, paid for by the pooled taxes of American taxpayers) they so much disdain and denounce. They do not want a fair and free market for everyone, open to all competitors, but a market free and unregulated for themselves and their profitability (a financial free-for-all for themselves); that is, they want selective, narrow state-supported oligarchical capitalism favoring themselves (fascism), like in the no-bid military-industrial-complex contracts for Haliburton Inc. (former "Vice" President Dick Cheney's financial alma mater), and its subsidiaries, to provision and accomplish contract projects for the American military and government embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupied by the U.S. military. They have a fossil-fuels cash cow that they want to milk, without interference or outside competition, to the last drop and wisp.
A public speaker and some broadcast lobbyists for this refocusing are the following:
John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil Company, who is now leading the organization Citizens for Affordable Energy. He is campaigning for exploitation of all-inclusive sources of energy, paying homage to renewable sources but emphasizing that the U.S. has virtually endless sources of fossil fuel energy, when fuel extraction from shale and tar sands is taken into consideration, while according no regard to the environmental and health hazards of long-term continued industrial and consumer use of fossil-fuels energy. What is to be expected from an oil man, although his hands figuratively may be covered with green gloves?
Chevron Oil Corporation, with daily NPR sponsorship ads on KQED 88.5 FM radio promoting all energy source use, until October of this year 2009, when it is running ads saying that it is supporting "human energy." The CEO of Chevron debated the CEO of the Sierra Club on NPR radio in the summer of 2009 on energy policy, taking a similar energy policy stance as that advocated by John Hofmeister.
Natural Gas has gotten into promoting itself as a patriotic alternative-energy (really!?) climate-change savior with broadcast ads to such an effect airing in August of 2009.
Bob Brinker, a former Wall Street and insurance company investment manager, the weekend afternoon KGO 810 AM radio talk-show host of Money Talk, who routinely advocates for federal government support for mass construction of nuclear electricity-generating power plants and replacement of its inventory of vehicles with natural-gas-powered vehicles, as well as for oil drilling and exploitation of ANWR (the pristine Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) and the marine-refuge, scenic coasts of California and Florida for a very lucrative but quantitatively a relative pittance of oil in view of hemispheric and worldwide oil reserves -- a resource inclined toward obsolescence in the mid term as a vehicle fuel anyway, its primary profit source. Like Rap Daddy says in his song titled 'Don't Make Me Scream': "While it's there, better get that cash!"
Brinker has a propensity for complaining in the abstract about "celebrity politicians" running the government, implying that experts should run the government. I know of nowhere in humanity where experts have run the governments other than under totalitarian communist and fascist regimes (conferring privileges and power on loyal party ideologues over pure merit, with the controlling capitalist roaders of the new, post-Mao-era communist leadership of the Peoples Republic of China having realized the untenability of a competent purely communist political-economic system of government and having moderated this inherited communist system into becoming an economically highly competitive dual system of communist State Capitalism, permitting limited democratic rights on the mainland, and limited democratic governance in Hong Kong), worse than most other forms of government -- not even under monarchies, oligarchies, kleptocracies and dictatorships is there rulership at the top by infallible, big brother-knows-best experts. However, the staffs of sub-cabinet and civil-service levels of first-world democratic-republic governments are selected largely based on academic, skills-training, employment-experience and test-taking and job-interview merit -- this also applies in large part to elected top executive and legislator staffs. Well, I guess no system or individual is perfect. It is amazing that he does not have a propensity for complaining about the incompetence and immorality of Wall Street, rogue investment activity and the corporate sector, supposedly the paragons of expertise (like the trillion-dollar-plus failure of too-big-to-fail Long-term Capital Management, managed by Nobel prize economists, that was bailed out by the federal government, and the too-big-to-fail whole of the investment banking sector both rescued by the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury and bailed out from imminent total collapse with more than a trillion dollars in taxpayer dollars, to name a few of the financial sector bodies governed by private experts -- see the blog Capitalism with a Conscience: National Health-care Insurance Reform for a broader enumeration of the bubble-bust industries governed by private sector experts). Let him try to convince the computer visionary dabblers, tinkerers and geek-adventurers, deserving long-time richest-man-in-the-world Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corp, and very rich-man Steve Jobs, co-founder and return-CEO rescuer of now again thriving Apple Computer Inc., that they need the oversight, training and stamp of approval of IBM Corp., wobbly Wall Street, the U.S. Small Business Bureau, the private U.S. Chamber of Commerce or a Dr. Edward Teller or Dr. Bill Wattenburg in order for them to set up and lead their companies and legitimately compete and succeed in the big-time corporate world.
Brinker also chides wind farms/wind turbines for being killers of birds -- although they are being adapted with better and better measures to minimize and eliminate this problem -- with no mention on his part as to the devastation and pollution all-too-frequent oil spills (apart from the CO2 poisoning and destruction of planetary and its life forms' health in the industrial burning of all fossil fuels), large and modest, wreak on marine life (including water birds) and habitats and shores as well as the livelihoods of fishers and local fishing industries, with inadequate, little or no compensation voluntarily granted to the adversely affected commercial interests and communities by the offenders or in litigation before and by courts stacked with conservative Republican and libertarian-minded judges sympathetic to big corporations. Somehow, Brinker doesn't come across as an environmentalist or a sincere lover of wildlife.
Let it be known that the Cosmic Prophet (aka Lord Prophet) has high regard for and confidence in the overall good character reflected of and financial judgment and integrity of advice expressed by Bob Brinker and that he is an adherent of capitalism: Good-Steward Communitarian Capitalism with a Conscience but not with a dunce cap, and that he absolutely rejects and denounces Law-of-the-Jungle, Predatory, Parasitical, Selfish, Ruthless, Savage, Short-sighted Pollution-and-Depletion, Extermination-and-Annihilation Capitalism for Short-term Privileged Interests and Primacy of Profit. The Cosmic Prophet opposes Predatory and Parasitical Prolitarianism likewise -- populist-driven extraordinary and exceptional taxation and/or appropriation in part of normal business and investment income for its own benefit, at times to the marginal profitability and financial survival risk of businesses and investors. It must be borne in mind that capitalism, whether it be natural empirical capitalism or classical-text or business-school capitalism, is the basis for an advanced society of splendor and a plethora of amenities, as capitalism maximally incentivizes creativity and an endless variety of innovations and products, and materially and socially generously rewards and empowers talent (individual and cooperative) and investment in talent and innovation -- which generically separates advanced society from primitive society and an energized advanced society from a sluggish, deprived, bumbling and stagnant prolitarian-governed second-class society, historically having advanced, powerful weapons and a large army. Most sane people, including religious authorities and front-line activists, the poor, affluent advocates for the poor, hard-core communists and anarchists, want a comfortable living environment, a residence with plumbing and heating, a sink with faucets that deliver running water, a toilet, a bathtub or shower, hot water, good food and drink, clean and attractive clothes, books and music, a vehicle or public transportation, and other material amenities -- innovations and amenities that are the legacy of natural empirical and/or institutional capitalism. The Cosmic Prophet is an advocate for the poor but is an unapologetic materialist who likes luxury and abhors poverty per se (not the poor) and would like to rid the world of it, but would not relinquish his quality of life in sympathy for the poor, though he would gladly pay taxes in concert with the rest of society's members to help alleviate poverty, a problem that the poor must also help to alleviate by restraining their reproduction beyond their means to support and to raise healthy educated, ethical and well-behaved offspring. He is aware that were many poor people better off they would have less concern than he has for the poor or for him if he were poor and that many would harm him to take money off of his person (as has happened several times in his life) or out of his bank account or to take items of value from his car (if not hijack his car) or from his residence. Indeed, the communists and fascists leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lon Nol and Pol Pot had middle-class upbringings and did not personally live austere lives comparable to the poor they led and over whom they presided had lived -- squalid, unhealthy, deprived, harsh, miserable, stifling and degrading lives from which they sought to rescue these and largely were struggling to stave off or flee from for themselves.
Bill Wattenburg, professor of nuclear engineering, a weekend late-evening KGO 810-AM radio talk-show host, who has been a guest on Bob Brinker's Money Talk show promoting the same energy-related ideas as those advocated by Bob Brinker. They routinely compliment each other on their respective shows as brilliant and as having the right ideas on the right direction for the U.S. energy economy. Wattenburg is the chieftain roaring firebrand railer against environmentalists. Among the promos for his show, he is billed as being the smartest man in the world, invoking the timeless truth of Abraham Lincoln's words: You can fool some of the people all of the time! Rumor has it that that Wattenburg owns a solarized home, has an on/off switchable house water heater and owns a hybrid car -- evidently he definitely is quite smart. A contradiction in terms? (However, it may be that their advocacy for nuclear-reactor production for electrical generation, if this applies to modular nuclear reactors, may be a good idea and advocacy.).
The particularly pugnacious side of Dr. Bill's distinctively sweet and sour manner has earned him the moniker Dr. Shrill Bill Rotten Nerd with some opposition.
John Bolton, lawyer, conservative think-tank fellow of multiple such think tanks, and recess-appointee former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from August of 2005 to December of 2006, under the Bush-II presidency, who resigned the latter post upon its impending expiration, knowing that the U.S. Senate would not approve him for a permanent appointment to that post in dread of his reputed abrasiveness and extremism. A repeat guest on conservative infotainer and progandist Lee Roger's KSFO 560-AM radio talk show, he asserts that government should not select the preferred national source of electrical energy generation but that the free marketplace should and that electricity generated by nuclear power plants is the way to go, as the electricity generated by them would be cheaper than by other means and that nuclear power plants are a clean and safe way to generate electricity. The three latter claims are just that and matters of vigorous dispute by professionals and experts on both sides of the dispute, as well as by a malfunction history of nuclear power plants in the U.S. and the problem of nuclear waste disposal (which the virtually lonely voice of Wattenburg argues is not a problem). As for the marketplace offering the public a variety of energy sources and means of electrical energy generation from which to select, with equitable government incentives for production among all of the alternatives (for emancipation of the economy from dependence on foreign oil and dirty coal for electrical energy generation), so as to have a level playing field for all competitors, this is exactly what the alternative energy companies, including geo-thermal and hydro-power companies, etc., want. Earth Island Institute reports that even now the nuclear power sector receives disproportionately very large federal financial support with no construction of new nuclear power plants with private funding. It is quite clear that Bolton is a half-cocked old-money, status-quo big-business talking-points lobbyist and advocate.
Earth: A Natural Bi-Solar Cyclically Rotating Planet for Around-the-Clock Inter-Continental Solar-Generated Electrical Energy Exchange, Forever, Via Redundantly Numerous Below-Ocean-and-Sea-Floor Electricity Transmission Cables.
Solar Fuel Energy for Everything: The next step up and forward in the advancement of human civilization with its raw fuel self supplied directly from clean sunlight or mere daylight and providing thoroughly clean on-site self-generated and self-distributed electricity, requiring no infrastructure, other than its on-site casing and wiring to the electrical grid, no supplier or supplies from the mining of or extraction from the environment, no chemicals or chemistry, per se, and involving no risk or damage to the environment, but always improving in efficiency and application and becoming more attractive and competitive in price. With solar power, one may opt for off-grid, independent self-generated and stored solar-sourced electricity and/or utility-company generated electricity -- currently stored solar energy entails battery or special solar-panel storage, involving chemistry, but likely soon will be superseded by already test-proven clean storage solar cells providing for 24/7 on-site, off-grid solar power operation immune from power failures or sourcing from the public-utility-companies' electrical grid. Storage solar cell technology is likewise self fueling and charge storing from sunlight or mere daylight and has virtually unlimited positive evolvability potential compared to solar technology's nascent rival, reportedly currently more highly productive yet clean hydrogen fuel-cell or (chemical/fossil-fuels) fuel-cell technology, previously owned by Chevron Oil Company, that is dependent on environmental extraction for its raw fuel source and on-site chemistry for its operating fuel or electricity generation and a supplier and constant raw fuel supplies, and thus is only an attractive and convenient transitional and temporary technology for fuel independence from fossil fuels, although it unfortunately optionally operates on fossil fuels as well, and so is a dead-end fuel technology with respect to the mid-term to long-term, for sure.
Over the long-term, after a solar-electric technology is paid for from its savings in avoided utilities and fossil-fuels bills, yet retains decades or more of additional electricity production life, solar energy for electricity generation and use is essentially free. Furthermore, solar-electricity-generation technology will eliminate the dangers of oil, gasoline and vapor natural gas pipelines and their aging, flawed construction, geophysical disturbance, malfunction, accidental assault or damage, tampering and sabotage. It will also do away with spill and explosion susceptible shipping, rail and truck transport of all fossil fuels, including coal, the dirtiest and least cleansible fossil fuel, in practice, despites long-time failing claims by the coal industry of clean coal to come (forever coming soon), a fossil-fuel resource associated with the worst air pollution, and environmental and ecological destruction and loss of workers' lives.
Much-less-dirty natural gas should promptly replace dirty coal in powering electricity generating power plants until the convergent, new alternative energy grid is fully established and enough feeder solar electricity power plants, perhaps new-and-advanced, hazard-and-fail-safe small modular nuclear power plants (very possibly a bait-and-switch, life-saving or extending nuclear-industry lead-the-public-on hoax and fantasy propaganda-gimmick for retaining and seducing continued investor and government backing in support of the preservation of the shaky and dangerous prevailing paradigm of nuclear power plants facing widespread public apprehension in light of numerous serious problems with nuclear power plants), hydrogen-fuel-cell systems and wind farms, etc., for electricity generation are online to offset their electricity production if not displace these interim majority natural-gas-based plants themselves. Environmentally protective and friendly states, with a majority of citizens who support a new green-and-clean energy technology economy, which have little or no coal mining industry, should promote, if not legislate, prompt conversion of coal-powered electricity-generating power plants to natural-gas-powered such power plants.
UPDATE: Given the gravity of the Gulf of Mexico BP Oil "drill, baby, bill" disaster of April through the summer of 2010, the ensuing criticism of the proposal that natural gas be an immediate replacement fuel for powering vehicles in the U.S. is reluctantly hereupon modified to concede that manufacturers and owners of liquid-gas vehicles and hybrid electric-liquid gas vehicles should be encouraged to retool or have serviced for retooling (easily done generally at a cost of less than $1,500.00) these vehicles for them to drive on natural gas or natural gas as well as electricity for hybrid vehicles, with the introduction and addition to the automobile market of a variety of makes and models of the plug-in rechargeable all-electric and plug-in rechargeable hybrid electric-(natural) gas vehicles (with the electric drive also rechargeable by gas/natural-gas drive). The natural gas supply source at homes and offices can also easily and relatively cheaply be outfitted with a safe on-premises natural-gas fueling device for natural-gas fueled vehicles, eliminating the need for gas refueling for the most part at commercial fueling service stations. So that the future inventory of federally, and maybe, state and municipally, owned vehicles does not become complacently attached to or dependent on also dirty and environmentally harmful fossil-fuel natural gas as the predominate source of vehicle fuel for the long term, if government, at the federal or all levels of society, is to changeover its inventory of new vehicle purchases to oil-fuel-free vehicles the new vehicles should be plug-in rechargeable hybrid natural gas-electric vehicles for long distance driving and plug-in rechargeable all-electric vehicles for local driving -- liquid gas is oil (that is, petroleum) derived and natural gas is a naturally occurring vapor gas. Accommodating and promoting natural gas for co-fueling hybrid vehicles and alternatively fueling the existing national inventory of liquid gas vehicles would immediately facilitate a radical and rapid transportation break away from dependence on politically and environmental thorny and disastrous oil-based fuel. However, co-fueled NG-electric or any fossil-fuels dependent vehicles are superfluous, irrelevant and inappropriate where there are solarized homes and offices that generate a substantial portion or most or all of their electricity, thereby minimizing or eliminating dependency for plug-in electric vehicles associated with these on coal and all other fossil-fuels for electrical fueling/recharging. Once solar garage doors and such house doors, for generating home electricity, that in turn can be used to clean-and-green charge plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, are on the market for homeowners to purchase, the funeral era of gasoline-only-engine vehicles will have arrived and demand for and sales of plug-in all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles will become overwhelming as wells as will the demand for and sales for solar garage and house doors for off-grid, standalone household electricity generation affordable to most homeowners, many of whom may not be able to afford full solarization of their homes. Solar garage doors with built-on sockets on the inside could both recharge vehicles in the garage and outside in the driveway via a slot on both sides of the width of the outside of the garage door for outside-vehicle recharging cords to lead to the inside socket-side of the garage door. This sales momentum and the demand-popularity for electric cars will also depend on and have to be preceded by or accompanied with electric-car prices being competitive with traditional gas-car prices. In an optimistic move in support of the alternative motoring technology for automobiles, Ford Motors Inc. has announced that it will be selling its 2011 plug-in hybrid Lincoln MKZ sedan for the same price as the gas-only model. Per Deus Ex Machina, minimal apologies and praises to Bob Brinker and Dr. Bill Wattenburg for their fortuitously redemptive counsel concerning this matter.
(NEW: On May 20th and 21st of 2010 the whole array of the mainstream news media in northern California reported that Tesla Motors Inc. has joined with Toyota Motors International Inc. to mass produce long-distance, high-speed, all-electric vehicles in a reopening of the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont, CA, recently closed and previously jointly operated by General Motors Inc. and Toyota Motors. Toyota has invested $50,000,000.00 in Tesla. Toyota and Tesla, which has secured $465,000,000.00 in other financing, will be manufacturing a Toyota designed and featured car on the Tesla-technology drive-train and Tesla will be manufacturing the first model of its own series of mass-market vehicle models, with each the Toyota and Tesla model planned to be on the retail market for sale in year 2012. The facility will be hiring an estimated total of 1,000 employees in the short term at the rate of 50 per month, ongoing, and may hire as many as 10,000 employees if the vehicles prove popular in the retail market. Reportedly, coming Tesla vehicles will be able to travel up to 300 miles on a single full electrical charge of the vehicle battery, a significant improvement on the 244-mile driving range of its first vehicle model, the Tesla Roadster for the niche wealthy market, debuted in 2008. All-electric vehicles require very little or minimal servicing and no smog-control checks, and auto insurance companies charge little for their insurance coverage. Moreover, the electrical cost for the per mile drive of an electric car is a small fraction of the gasoline cost per mile drive for the most-efficient, highest mileage per gallon/liter gasoline- or biofuels-powered vehicles. Other major auto manufacturing companies are introducing all-electric vehicles this year and next that can drive from 40 to up to 100 miles per battery charge, whereas daily commute miles in urban centers normally are 40 miles and less. Also the recharging infrastructure for all-electric vehicles is spreading quickly, and there are solar charging units for them that can be installed at homes and condo and apartment complexes; however, standard 110-volt electrical outlets [also known as sockets or receptacles] for slow charging and standard 220-volt electrical outlets for fast charging, available in virtually any garage, make solar chargers an off-grid option. It is a sure bet that within 50 years mass-market petroleum-only powered vehicles will no longer be manufactured and the inventory of existing petroleum powered mass-market vehicles will be viewed as primitive and antiquated, and much of the world will be able to kiss good bye to vehicle dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil or any more than lubricating oil, obtainable from plants and animal waste. Currently, there are both the all-electric Coda and Nissan Leaf sedans on the automobile market for sale. The plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt coming to the retail market in 2011 can travel 40 miles all electrically on a full electrical charge, but continuously recharge its electric-drive battery with its gas motor, and travel a continuous 350 miles on a combination of an initial full charge of its electric-drive battery and a full tank of gasoline. The successful 26-hour flight of the Swiss-made Solar Impulse manned-airplane on 07-07-2010 augurs for and alludes to a time to come of a market of all-solar-powered airliners, aircraft, watercraft, rail and road vehicles, as well as electric-car charging stations and their recharging ports, factories and electronic bill boards, that operate and charge from mere daylight and afterward operate in the dark, after dusk, from reserve charges of their solar fuel cells -- we can also expect portable computers and other portable electronics devices to eventually operate from the power of natural and artificial light. Pursuant to BBC's online news of 07-16-2010, the Solar Impulse test flight was followed by a successful to-date, 2-week test flight of the U.S.-made U.S.-Army eternal-flight solar airplane, a drone or unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] theoretically capable of staying in flight permanently, named Zephyr, operating according to the same principles.).
Already there are solar mini-panel calculators, solar-battery watches, solar outdoor cookers, solar hot-water heaters, combination solar/crank-powered radios, solar/crank-charged flashlights and such rural night lamps, and solar-charged deck, patio and garden lamps that glow all night long. In time computers, television sets, cell phones and miscellaneous other traditionally electrically powered electronic devices will be operated and/or battery recharged and powered via a solar-power capture cord made for placement in daylight and sunlight, with the solar-capture end placed in daylight or sunlight and the other end plugged into the power-cord jack of the electronic device.
There is a plodding and tenacious media campaign under way by conservative talk-show hosts and guests, and business publications' journalists, as well as by touring public speakers on radio public affairs forums, touting and promoting a refocusing of the clean, renewable energy agenda and policy to a different one emphasizing government support for 1) a crash program for construction of nuclear power plants for electrical energy generation and 2) production of natural gas (naturally occurring vapor gas) fueled vehicles and natural gas fueling outlets for replacement of the federal government's inventory of 600,000 liquid-gas-powered and hybrid vehicles and new vehicles sold by automobile manufacturers to the public, (in preference over plug-in hybrid gas or non-polluting biofuel-electric and long-distance all-electric vehicles currently dominating the alternative energy vehicle market and growing in this regard by leaps and bounds, with newer hybrid vehicles minimizing and scaling down gas or non-polluting bio-fuel use and subserving -- recharging the discharged electric-drive battery while standing in for it until its restored full charge -- increased and primary electrical driving reliance). They argue that solar and wind electricity generating technology are too slow in proliferating and only account for less than 2% of current electrical energy generation (ignoring that alternative renewable energy sources have already accounted for 16% of the energy market worldwide in recent years, according to Rocky Mountain Institute chief scientist and CEO Amory Lovins) and are too unreliable and expensive to supplant and meet the nation's electrical and transportation energy needs in a transition from foreign oil dependency and dirty domestic coal in the near term or over the foreseeable future -- the second killing in the cradle of the reemerging electrical vehicle and entrenchment of vehicle dependency on fossil fuel/s. Further, they argue that a new market of plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles will necessarily be dependent on utility companies' dirty-coal-generated electricity for battery recharging at night when solar generated electricity is not available with the absence of sun light, resulting in status-quo level releases of hydro-carbon pollution into the atmosphere, if not more -- which is significantly nonsense and manipulative, misleading partial truth posing as whole truth as the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. DOE reports that coal-fired power plants account for 56% of net electricity generation in the U.S., with the remainder generated primarily by nuclear power plants, hydro, NG, solar and wind sources. Maybe they are ignorant of or mum about the fact that already solarized homes, and government and commercial facilities and office buildings and the solarized buildings of religious institutions, etc., are able, on their own, to recharge plug-in electric and all-electric vehicles during the day, come rain, overcast or shine, by harnessing daylight alone, without the need for direct sunlight, for electricity generation, and of the fact that once the smart-grid-to-come-online is in place solar-tech generated electricity convergent with wind turbine electrical power from different regions of the nation will be able to cooperatively and collaboratively feed the smart grid with electrical power around the clock, night and day, 24/7/365-6. Maybe too they have not considered that at one time automobiles made up less than one percent of the transportation system, when horses, steamships and steam-engine trains were the traditional and dominant forms of transportation, and that automobiles were then considered a novelty and impracticality with no long-term future in serving the public at large when first introduced, and later slandered as a cause of high-speed death beyond a lethal speed that humans allegedly were said to be unable to tolerate and survive (circa 40 or 45 mph) -- maybe they conveniently dismiss the relevancy of Moore's law relating to the rate of doubling of the number of transistors that can be inexpensively added to electronic integrated circuits for improvements in digital processing speed and memory and imaging capabilities, found to be applicable to the rate of improvement of much modern technology in general, as also observably applicable to improvements in solar and wind energy technologies. Maybe they have not considered that neither solar nor wind power would be unreliable sources of electrical energy when daylight-time versus night-time nations, in our bi-solar-day world, collaborate in generating and exchanging solar-derived electrical energy during their respective daily opposing light-versus-dark cycles as the Earth rotates ceaselessly through its bi-solar day, and as the existing technology and techniques for storing solar-electric energy take hold and advance on a broad scale -- Europe is already undertaking to work with North African and tropical nations in this regard. A succinct way of expressing this relationship is say that solar-derived electrical energy from daylight nations can be transferred by cable to night-time phase nations, and reciprocal transfer can occur with the change in the light phase between the halves of our planet. The same consideration applies to up-and-down periods for wind-generated electrical energy between the high producing wind regions within the nation. Nor do they make clear that natural gas is not a clean fossil fuel but is a dirty albeit so-to-say cleaner (dirty but less dirty) fossil fuel than oil or liquid gas and is another fossil fuel we should endeavor eventually, but as soon as possible, to emancipate ourselves from as a fuel source. Nor do we want vehicles to compete for natural gas with housing and buildings, for their heating and appliance powering, which would permanently and drastically drive up the price of natural gas, any more than we want food crops and food-crop land to make biofuels to compete with abundant food availability and affordability for humans and animals. We also need to consider whether it is cheaper and safer to promote investment in bi-solar day-versus-night inter-Continental solar energy exchange utilities development (collaborative multinational, intercontinental solar and wind) for electrical energy production and exchange concerns and existing solar and wind storage technology and techniques over embarking on a crash program for nuclear power plant construction that would be dependent much more on taxpayer funding (very costly funding) and take more time to come online than solar and wind energy enterprises and their energy production evolution. Nothing is stopping the nuclear industry and Wall Street from safely building, within government regulations, new nuclear electrical power plants at the expense of private money from private investor funds, possibly with government tax incentives.
Instead of natural gas being deployed to power vehicles, it most beneficially should be deployed to replace currently predominating dirty coal, as in coal-fired power plants, in powering electricity generating power plants. If natural gas has any compelling value in powering vehicles such would be to power large transport trucks, hopefully hybrid gas-electric trucks, until large transport trucks can be exclusively powered optimally electrically. The proven abundance of domestic natural gas can virtually immediately both generate and supply electricity and continue to supply directly pure natural gas nationally and for centuries, if necessary, to buildings of every kind at relatively low cost for building lighting, heating, cooking and electrical device and equipment powering needs, ultimately supplemental to majority future electricity generation by the convergent alternative energy grid and power plants and off-grid such technology. However, the technologies for harvesting coal, petroleum and natural gas for electricity, propulsion and fire generation should not be lost as they would likely be ideal, in part, for powering human settlements on Mars where their CO2 emissions could theoretically be strategic in building up a thick atmosphere on Mars hospitable to vegetating and crop farming the surface of Mars. Evidence of large deposits of hydrocarbons on Mars has long been established, as well as of a variety of specific other valuable minerals. By the way, petroleum will always remain valuable on Earth in the making of medicines and for making fabrics and plastics.
Those who advocate using natural gas (vapor gas) to power vehicles typically do so without regard to its contribution to global warming and environmental and human ill effects. Typically their argument is that we as a nation have an abundance of domestic natural gas and should use it instead of liquid gas derived from oil (mostly foreign oil) to power our vehicles to free our transportation system from dependence on foreign oil -- their concern is national energy independence and not CO2 atmospheric pollution and global warming from fossil-fuels emissions as well. Like the advocates for government financial support for building a large number of traditional large nuclear power plants domestically (at times, unstable), the advocates for natural gas powering of federal government vehicles are generally old-school elderly or old people of the old-nuclear-reactor and fossil-fuels paradigms and era, who were raised and educated, and who aged, under these paradigms and in that era. These energy paradigms, along with dams, are most of what they know, have been served by and have benefited and profited from and believe in when it comes to energy resources. They and much of their generation pose static inertia and obstruction to change to the new energy paradigm for the following generations and the progressives of their generation. Unfortunately, like T. Boone Pickens said, it is the old-timer (elderly) conservative chairmen of major industry, media and commerce who control big business and significantly influence politics to the detriment of much needed change in our society in their wanting to preserve the status quo familiar and favorable to themselves.
These natural gas promoters -- critics of dirty coal -- are not against a dirty oil or dirty fossil-fuels-energy-powered society, as they are openly in favor of "drill, baby, drill" of our coasts and in ANWAR. They attempt to minimize the danger of marine oil disasters, dismissing and disregarding harm to marine animals and the water, ecology and human communities affected by them, saying tar balls naturally occur in coastal waters and that there is naturally on the order of 100 times more oil seepage from ocean and sea floors worldwide than that of the Gulf disaster, ignoring that unnaturally concentrated and locally massive oil suffusion kills off many species of marine life and water fowl and that this thick and massive liquid oil rises in such form or at the surface of ocean and sea waters whereas naturally occurring oil does not, with rare exception, and does not occur on many, if not most, coasts (their dismissive remarks and attitude are like their comparing a teaspoon full of cyanide in a cup of water, analogous to unnatural marine oil eruptions and gushing, with a cup full of cyanide disbursed in a giant lake of water, analogous to natural marine oil seepage). I dare them to drink the cup of water with the teaspoon of cyanide while I swim in or drink from the giant lake with only a cup full of this poison suffused in it, and no other of significance in amount.
Also, the major oil companies are also engaged in major natural gas exploration, extraction and production, so pretending to denigrate truly dirty coal for electricity generation is just a rationale for expanding dirty oil and dirty natural gas, alongside traditional nuclear power and its cumulative problematic waste disposal problem (which some crazed, wicked and fanatical proponents argue falsely is a resolved problem), in dominance for powering our society, and marginalizing the competitor rising alternative clean-and-green solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and fuel-cell energy source and new energy paradigm threatening their past and impending passe energy monopoly. These folks are nothing other than big-oil, natural-gas and nuclear-energy propagandists and boosters; government big spending to support and insure them, and their profit margins, and stock values and steady, stable and fat dividend stream is their enduring and primary interest.
(NEW: However, the nuclear-electrical energy generation scientists are making a strong case that low-cost mass-production, standardized small modular nuclear powered plants, with standardized parts, are virtually attack-, hazard- and fail-safe and easier and much cheaper to build and operate, and are more efficient in generating electricity, than conventional large nuclear reactors, perhaps explaining why President Obama has recently publicly committed the federal government to supporting the production of plentiful new nuclear reactors in the U.S. Read on the subject of modular nuclear reactors for more information of this new type of nuclear reactor. This type of reactor may also be a good electrical power source for Moon, Mars and other extraterrestrial base facilities for human settlements in the future, if its billing is not hyperbolic propaganda.)
Solar energy is essentially infinite, from the standpoint of the life-expectancy of our species, planet Earth, star (the sun), and solar system, and wind energy is quasi so, with both being basically safe and ecologically friendly and their pliable technologies ever being made nearly as friendly in the near term.
Are these talk-show hosts, guests, and touring public speakers, who are advocating for "big government" support for natural gas and highly expensive (at taxpayers' expense) nuclear sourced energy dominance in the energy market, really the hypocritical anti-big-government but self-proclaimed profit-motive free-marketplace libertarian, Wall Street and pro-traditional big-business conservative Republican lobbyists for the financial balance sheets and bottom lines of the profit-and-loss statements, and stock values and dividend earnings, of the status-quo big fossil-fuels and nuclear industries? Of course!
They want big government to patronize, subsidize and promote their business and investment interests in the name, and under the guise, of acting in the national interest and out of a sense of patriotism. They are unconscionable, insatiably gluttonous financial vampires and money maggots. Let natural gas cars and nuclear electrical power plants compete in their conservative Republican and libertarian free marketplace with the invisible hand of Darwinian natural selection, in supply-demand capitalism, picking the winners on a level playing field, at their own expense, with their competitors' businesses and not be advantaged with state socialism in assistance and patronage of their own businesses, at taxpayers' expense and the expense of their competitors -- the socialism for the poor and middle class Americans (when it comes to public education, unemployment benefits, Social Security pensions, Medicare health care for the elderly, national health care insurance for all Americans, including children, paid for by the pooled taxes of American taxpayers) they so much disdain and denounce. They do not want a fair and free market for everyone, open to all competitors, but a market free and unregulated for themselves and their profitability (a financial free-for-all for themselves); that is, they want selective, narrow state-supported oligarchical capitalism favoring themselves (fascism), like in the no-bid military-industrial-complex contracts for Haliburton Inc. (former "Vice" President Dick Cheney's financial alma mater), and its subsidiaries, to provision and accomplish contract projects for the American military and government embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupied by the U.S. military. They have a fossil-fuels cash cow that they want to milk, without interference or outside competition, to the last drop and wisp.
A public speaker and some broadcast lobbyists for this refocusing are the following:
John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil Company, who is now leading the organization Citizens for Affordable Energy. He is campaigning for exploitation of all-inclusive sources of energy, paying homage to renewable sources but emphasizing that the U.S. has virtually endless sources of fossil fuel energy, when fuel extraction from shale and tar sands is taken into consideration, while according no regard to the environmental and health hazards of long-term continued industrial and consumer use of fossil-fuels energy. What is to be expected from an oil man, although his hands figuratively may be covered with green gloves?
Chevron Oil Corporation, with daily NPR sponsorship ads on KQED 88.5 FM radio promoting all energy source use, until October of this year 2009, when it is running ads saying that it is supporting "human energy." The CEO of Chevron debated the CEO of the Sierra Club on NPR radio in the summer of 2009 on energy policy, taking a similar energy policy stance as that advocated by John Hofmeister.
Natural Gas has gotten into promoting itself as a patriotic alternative-energy (really!?) climate-change savior with broadcast ads to such an effect airing in August of 2009.
Bob Brinker, a former Wall Street and insurance company investment manager, the weekend afternoon KGO 810 AM radio talk-show host of Money Talk, who routinely advocates for federal government support for mass construction of nuclear electricity-generating power plants and replacement of its inventory of vehicles with natural-gas-powered vehicles, as well as for oil drilling and exploitation of ANWR (the pristine Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) and the marine-refuge, scenic coasts of California and Florida for a very lucrative but quantitatively a relative pittance of oil in view of hemispheric and worldwide oil reserves -- a resource inclined toward obsolescence in the mid term as a vehicle fuel anyway, its primary profit source. Like Rap Daddy says in his song titled 'Don't Make Me Scream': "While it's there, better get that cash!"
Brinker has a propensity for complaining in the abstract about "celebrity politicians" running the government, implying that experts should run the government. I know of nowhere in humanity where experts have run the governments other than under totalitarian communist and fascist regimes (conferring privileges and power on loyal party ideologues over pure merit, with the controlling capitalist roaders of the new, post-Mao-era communist leadership of the Peoples Republic of China having realized the untenability of a competent purely communist political-economic system of government and having moderated this inherited communist system into becoming an economically highly competitive dual system of communist State Capitalism, permitting limited democratic rights on the mainland, and limited democratic governance in Hong Kong), worse than most other forms of government -- not even under monarchies, oligarchies, kleptocracies and dictatorships is there rulership at the top by infallible, big brother-knows-best experts. However, the staffs of sub-cabinet and civil-service levels of first-world democratic-republic governments are selected largely based on academic, skills-training, employment-experience and test-taking and job-interview merit -- this also applies in large part to elected top executive and legislator staffs. Well, I guess no system or individual is perfect. It is amazing that he does not have a propensity for complaining about the incompetence and immorality of Wall Street, rogue investment activity and the corporate sector, supposedly the paragons of expertise (like the trillion-dollar-plus failure of too-big-to-fail Long-term Capital Management, managed by Nobel prize economists, that was bailed out by the federal government, and the too-big-to-fail whole of the investment banking sector both rescued by the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury and bailed out from imminent total collapse with more than a trillion dollars in taxpayer dollars, to name a few of the financial sector bodies governed by private experts -- see the blog Capitalism with a Conscience: National Health-care Insurance Reform for a broader enumeration of the bubble-bust industries governed by private sector experts). Let him try to convince the computer visionary dabblers, tinkerers and geek-adventurers, deserving long-time richest-man-in-the-world Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corp, and very rich-man Steve Jobs, co-founder and return-CEO rescuer of now again thriving Apple Computer Inc., that they need the oversight, training and stamp of approval of IBM Corp., wobbly Wall Street, the U.S. Small Business Bureau, the private U.S. Chamber of Commerce or a Dr. Edward Teller or Dr. Bill Wattenburg in order for them to set up and lead their companies and legitimately compete and succeed in the big-time corporate world.
Brinker also chides wind farms/wind turbines for being killers of birds -- although they are being adapted with better and better measures to minimize and eliminate this problem -- with no mention on his part as to the devastation and pollution all-too-frequent oil spills (apart from the CO2 poisoning and destruction of planetary and its life forms' health in the industrial burning of all fossil fuels), large and modest, wreak on marine life (including water birds) and habitats and shores as well as the livelihoods of fishers and local fishing industries, with inadequate, little or no compensation voluntarily granted to the adversely affected commercial interests and communities by the offenders or in litigation before and by courts stacked with conservative Republican and libertarian-minded judges sympathetic to big corporations. Somehow, Brinker doesn't come across as an environmentalist or a sincere lover of wildlife.
Let it be known that the Cosmic Prophet (aka Lord Prophet) has high regard for and confidence in the overall good character reflected of and financial judgment and integrity of advice expressed by Bob Brinker and that he is an adherent of capitalism: Good-Steward Communitarian Capitalism with a Conscience but not with a dunce cap, and that he absolutely rejects and denounces Law-of-the-Jungle, Predatory, Parasitical, Selfish, Ruthless, Savage, Short-sighted Pollution-and-Depletion, Extermination-and-Annihilation Capitalism for Short-term Privileged Interests and Primacy of Profit. The Cosmic Prophet opposes Predatory and Parasitical Prolitarianism likewise -- populist-driven extraordinary and exceptional taxation and/or appropriation in part of normal business and investment income for its own benefit, at times to the marginal profitability and financial survival risk of businesses and investors. It must be borne in mind that capitalism, whether it be natural empirical capitalism or classical-text or business-school capitalism, is the basis for an advanced society of splendor and a plethora of amenities, as capitalism maximally incentivizes creativity and an endless variety of innovations and products, and materially and socially generously rewards and empowers talent (individual and cooperative) and investment in talent and innovation -- which generically separates advanced society from primitive society and an energized advanced society from a sluggish, deprived, bumbling and stagnant prolitarian-governed second-class society, historically having advanced, powerful weapons and a large army. Most sane people, including religious authorities and front-line activists, the poor, affluent advocates for the poor, hard-core communists and anarchists, want a comfortable living environment, a residence with plumbing and heating, a sink with faucets that deliver running water, a toilet, a bathtub or shower, hot water, good food and drink, clean and attractive clothes, books and music, a vehicle or public transportation, and other material amenities -- innovations and amenities that are the legacy of natural empirical and/or institutional capitalism. The Cosmic Prophet is an advocate for the poor but is an unapologetic materialist who likes luxury and abhors poverty per se (not the poor) and would like to rid the world of it, but would not relinquish his quality of life in sympathy for the poor, though he would gladly pay taxes in concert with the rest of society's members to help alleviate poverty, a problem that the poor must also help to alleviate by restraining their reproduction beyond their means to support and to raise healthy educated, ethical and well-behaved offspring. He is aware that were many poor people better off they would have less concern than he has for the poor or for him if he were poor and that many would harm him to take money off of his person (as has happened several times in his life) or out of his bank account or to take items of value from his car (if not hijack his car) or from his residence. Indeed, the communists and fascists leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lon Nol and Pol Pot had middle-class upbringings and did not personally live austere lives comparable to the poor they led and over whom they presided had lived -- squalid, unhealthy, deprived, harsh, miserable, stifling and degrading lives from which they sought to rescue these and largely were struggling to stave off or flee from for themselves.
Bill Wattenburg, professor of nuclear engineering, a weekend late-evening KGO 810-AM radio talk-show host, who has been a guest on Bob Brinker's Money Talk show promoting the same energy-related ideas as those advocated by Bob Brinker. They routinely compliment each other on their respective shows as brilliant and as having the right ideas on the right direction for the U.S. energy economy. Wattenburg is the chieftain roaring firebrand railer against environmentalists. Among the promos for his show, he is billed as being the smartest man in the world, invoking the timeless truth of Abraham Lincoln's words: You can fool some of the people all of the time! Rumor has it that that Wattenburg owns a solarized home, has an on/off switchable house water heater and owns a hybrid car -- evidently he definitely is quite smart. A contradiction in terms? (However, it may be that their advocacy for nuclear-reactor production for electrical generation, if this applies to modular nuclear reactors, may be a good idea and advocacy.).
The particularly pugnacious side of Dr. Bill's distinctively sweet and sour manner has earned him the moniker Dr. Shrill Bill Rotten Nerd with some opposition.
John Bolton, lawyer, conservative think-tank fellow of multiple such think tanks, and recess-appointee former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from August of 2005 to December of 2006, under the Bush-II presidency, who resigned the latter post upon its impending expiration, knowing that the U.S. Senate would not approve him for a permanent appointment to that post in dread of his reputed abrasiveness and extremism. A repeat guest on conservative infotainer and progandist Lee Roger's KSFO 560-AM radio talk show, he asserts that government should not select the preferred national source of electrical energy generation but that the free marketplace should and that electricity generated by nuclear power plants is the way to go, as the electricity generated by them would be cheaper than by other means and that nuclear power plants are a clean and safe way to generate electricity. The three latter claims are just that and matters of vigorous dispute by professionals and experts on both sides of the dispute, as well as by a malfunction history of nuclear power plants in the U.S. and the problem of nuclear waste disposal (which the virtually lonely voice of Wattenburg argues is not a problem). As for the marketplace offering the public a variety of energy sources and means of electrical energy generation from which to select, with equitable government incentives for production among all of the alternatives (for emancipation of the economy from dependence on foreign oil and dirty coal for electrical energy generation), so as to have a level playing field for all competitors, this is exactly what the alternative energy companies, including geo-thermal and hydro-power companies, etc., want. Earth Island Institute reports that even now the nuclear power sector receives disproportionately very large federal financial support with no construction of new nuclear power plants with private funding. It is quite clear that Bolton is a half-cocked old-money, status-quo big-business talking-points lobbyist and advocate.
The pro traditional and status-quo energy paradigm views of these parties are espoused by conservative broadcast-media news commentators, including on NPR. Some of these commentators assert that oil-based fuel for powering vehicles will, as a practical matter, remain the primary source of automobile fuel until it is exhausted.
