Or Relief at the pumps: Revolutionary hydrogen fuel could cost just 90p per GALLON (and it will run in existing cars) | Mail Online
Sounds very cool, but where do you get the hydrogen from and how much energy does it take to get hold of it? If it's as good as the Mail (ha!) pretends, this has to be the best news I have heard for yonks.
The plants got on fine without humankind, so we don't need to worry about an atmosphere so low in CO2 that nothing will grow. The dumbest thing in all this is the clearing of forest. Plants take in CO2, punt out the oxygen and turn the carbon into wood. So the more you have when you are trying to reduce CO2, the better. Instead of which, let's burn the rainforest, reducing our CO2 "filter" and punt all the carbon back out into the atmosphere. In fact, cutting trees produces more CO2 annually than transportation. But no one seems to want to get tough with Indonesia and Brazil. Sometimes people are so selfish and thick it defies credibility.
well as far as I know extracting hydrogen is not that hard or energy consuming. I was one's told (no idea if it is correct) that any element that can exist on it's own without applying extreme heat, cold, pressure and so on is easy to extract. There are current ways but most produce co2, saying that my 1st link would work well with that. There are now other ways for extraction. How To Extract Hydrogen From Water | The Green Optimistic
I was always told that extracting aluminium from bauxite used massive energy and cost a fortune. But whatever. Perhaps electrolysing water to produce hydrogen is extremely easy. You could have the plant in the sea and use wave power to power it. Then it would all be free. I'm sure there will be a chemist and/or physicist along in a moment to tell us all about it.
I think putting that electric extraction dingi to water would be a disaster. Think about all the electricuted dolphins
Correct which is why aluminium smelters are ofen found close to hydroelectric schemes. Hydrogen doesn't exist in nature in it's elemental state, it is far too reactive it combines with other stuff and releases energy at the same time, to turn it back to elemental hydrogen, ie fuel, that energy must be replaced from some other source. I used to make hydrogen as a boy with my trainset transformer, it is very easy but the energy taken to split hydogen and oxygen from water is roughly equal to the energy it gives back when it burns back to water, there is no gain. There are other methods such as methanol and catalysts but you have to make the methanol first which has it's own set of problems ie do you want to feed the world or ride Ducatis. You could make a wave powered hydrogen generator but the scale of the project to produce industrial quantities would be enormous, along with it's cost, the ratio of EROEI would be poor and it certainly wouldn't be free. Bear in mind that attempts have been made to produce useable energy from waves for decades yet we still haven't progressed beyond the experimental stage, that should tell you something about the difficulty of the problem. Petrol costs less than 90p per gallon, think about it :wink: Believe me, if there was an easy answer we would be doing it today.
I'm not so sure. There are huge vested interests in carrying on as before. If there was enough money and research invested in solving the energy problem, I suspect we would be solving it. I wrote about this here on my blog for the interested (such as it is) : Moore's law could apply to alternative energy - The Glidd of Glood Blog
Interesting Blog, I will browse it some other time. Is that Skye or Rum I can see in the background ? Moore's Law is essentially an engineering and technological probelm, although I believe that miniaturisation is starting to run up against phyical barriers. Energy cannot be created it can only change from one form to another. A solar panel will never give out more electrical energy than the equivalent solar energy that falls upon it, it cannot be thousands of times more efficient than it is today, never, ever. Without a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe we have an impending energy crisis, that is if overpopulation doesn't get us first. Apply some sort of Moore's Law to population growth and you quickly realise it must fail. I am not sure that any book that links tobacco and AGW is going to be very objective, the arguments either stand on their own or they don't. In the short term it looks like Thorium reactors could be quite interesting. Unlike Uranium the reaction is not one that has to be constantly moderated to prevent a runaway chain reaction but one that requires an external neutron source to maintain fission, meltdown can be simply prevented and the whole process is not dependent upon external sources of cooling . The only reason why Uranium was chosen as a fuel source was the production of weapons grade fusion products, every gram of Plutonium around the world was created by man in an atomic reactor. I am old enough to remember Harold Wilson state that the new generation of fast breeder reactor would produce electricity 'too cheap to be metered', he also said that after devaluation that the 'pound in your pocket was still worth a pound' but that is a different story.
On a related theme try Richard Heinberg | The End of Growth he does buy into the AGW paradigm as a part of the ever increasing environmental cost of doing business (think BP, Gulf of Mexico) and along with resource depletion and unstable financial institutions predicts that growth was oh so 20th century and never to be repeated again. It is a compelling read.
Paps of Jura by the looks of things. It was taken in the Western Isles on the way to Caol Ila and Lagavulin. Naturally, you can only get out the energy (or a proportion of it) that you put in. But as solar energy is free, it stands to reason that the more efficient the solar cell, the more interesting it becomes, so long as you don't mind the bit of sand you've put it on, or the roof or whatever, not getting any sunlight. That efficiency will rise with investment. There are already prototypes of solar paint which glean energy from the light that falls on buildings. When you look at where the internal combustion engine and computers were 100 years ago (either embryonic or non-existent) it seems not unreasonable to postulate that a few decades hence, the whole energy thing could look very different with sufficient brain power harnessed to address the problem. The whole premise of the book is to illustrate how some very influential individuals were suborned to use their reputations to come out in favour of the non-harmful effects of cigarette smoking and thence, through various other shenanigans, to support the thesis that there is no global warming. The book is very specific and enlightening and makes a terrific read. You can't refute its evidence once you have read it. To refuse its thesis without reading it is just burying one's head in the sand. It's not a pseudo leftist polemic, just plain fact which, by the nature of the PR companies that these guys worked for means that the general population and the media has been utterly hoodwinked.
I will look into this. But the mantra of growth is predicated on the fact that as efficiency rises, you need less and less people to work with attendant rising employment and all that entails. The only way out of this conundrum is constant growth. No one has yet shown how in a society which does not grow economically, you can have full employment as efficiency and machines drive people out of work. It's a bit of a bastard.
They kind off did, most goodie goodie sci-fi movies like startrek show you a solution. We become so advanced that all basic needs to live are provided free of charge to all. You can do any job you want to as long as you want to. There is no monetary value to anything so you actually do the job for satisfaction. That means loads of people will do fuck all but still everyone will do what they want.
Utterly ridiculous, another global warming myth product. Also, can anyone think of anything more dangerous than a bike that you can't hear? Thought not.
Yep. A rider who has to rely on noise to stay safe. If you really think that noise is the only thing stopping you from mowing down pedestrians, you seriously need to take a look at your riding ability.
That's a wee bit harsh I think. Bicycling in central London for a few years - it's amazing the amount of pedestrians who just jump under your wheels without looking because they don't hear you. And there are plenty of car drivers who don't check their mirrors. A loud exhaust is at least a safety feature.
I'm allowed to say that as for the last 6 years I've had a bog stock exhaust on my 999. Cos I didn't want to annoy peasants in villages, I didn't like the expense, and I didn't want to junk the cat (which is meant to serve some useful function) and I don't want to mess about with it all putting it back to stock for MOTs and I don't want to be paranoid about the Bill. Mind you, if it just made a whizzing farting sound like so many new bikes, I might have to go the Termi route. But it sounds quite reasonable stock. Swings and roundabouts.
