Comments on: Bush on Energy

By: jrbehrman

jrbehrman — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:56:40 +0000

Here in Texas, Democrats and others are taking the sort of serious approach HANSEN recommends, perhaps because we, too, can look at the whole earth from low-orbit, even the moon.

A core concept is integration of complementary technologies. And, a specific example is integrated gasification of coal and sequestration of carbon dioxide.

There is actually a small-scale, non-earmarked, non-political, un-academic, actually practical project here to generate gas from a refinery by-product, called pet-coke, and feed it into an existing coal-fired power-plant. We already inject carbon dioxide into depleted oil reservoirs for tertiary recovery of oil.

This is exactly the sort of economic/engineering replacement called for by Hansen. It is a small step, to be sure, but not the mix of hype and deception that trickles down from Bush or, for that matter, from the Congressional Democrats.

My fear, of course, is that the bond-lawyers and paper-hangers will jump on this, bribe the politicians, and turn a process of trial-and-error engineering progress into just another fad/bubble.

We do not actually have the military-technical or political-economic institutions to address energy problems/solutions with on a large-scale or, more importantly, scalably -- meaning on a logistic curve going from small to large in financially sound increments.

On the contrary, we have state-sponsored Ponzi schemes that both rotten parties jump on, skimming on the upside and shifting on the downside. LTCM/ENRON/SIV ... The Beat Goes On!

By: jrbehrman

jrbehrman — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here in Texas, Democrats and others are taking the sort of serious approach HANSEN recommends, perhaps because we, too, can look at the whole earth from low-orbit, even the moon.

A core concept is integration of complementary technologies. And, a specific example is integrated gasification of coal and sequestration of carbon dioxide.

There is actually a small-scale, non-earmarked, non-political, un-academic, actually practical project here to generate gas from a refinery by-product, called pet-coke, and feed it into an existing coal-fired power-plant. We already inject carbon dioxide into depleted oil reservoirs for tertiary recovery of oil.

This is exactly the sort of economic/engineering replacement called for by Hansen. It is a small step, to be sure, but not the mix of hype and deception that trickles down from Bush or, for that matter, from the Congressional Democrats.

My fear, of course, is that the bond-lawyers and paper-hangers will jump on this, bribe the politicians, and turn a process of trial-and-error engineering progress into just another fad/bubble.

We do not actually have the military-technical or political-economic institutions to address energy problems/solutions with on a large-scale or, more importantly, scalably — meaning on a logistic curve going from small to large in financially sound increments.

On the contrary, we have state-sponsored Ponzi schemes that both rotten parties jump on, skimming on the upside and shifting on the downside. LTCM/ENRON/SIV … The Beat Goes On!