How many years before China is No. 1?
POSTED BY: TraineeAlternate
UPDATED: Saturday, September 5, 2026 17:48
VIEWED: 15091
PAGE 7 of 15
OH WAIT! This was from Chrisisall,
Quote:I can answer that. It was all over the internet a long time ago. Unfortunately, the news items have been removed by the various internet publications. So this reference will have to do:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Hydrogen, as it turns out, can be easily produced from "wet" ethanol using a cerium catalyst, and also from water using solar power.
originally posted by AUraptoris all:
Another Neo-Lib meme! Where's you proof? Or the link?
This kind of unsubstanciated hyperbole is what you think passes for facts?
This is just another attempt to make Bush look bad.
http://www.it.umn.edu/news/inventing/2004_Summer/harvestinghydrogen.ht
ml
Quote:The original publication was in Science, February, 2004.
Lanny Schmidt ... has just invented a reactor that extracts hydrogen from ethanol.
OK. I really messed up. Yup, I did. Anyway, this is the answer.
Now that I think about it, it was that easy to mistake this post from the real Auraptor.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Hey there Chrisisall - how ya doing?
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Hey, Rue! LOL, I thought I might confuse and make fun at the same time. Sure is easy to 'mock'(ha ha) some people!! It's fun too, as AUR said.
Boy this place is fun sometimes
(Great new thread HK started, huh?)
Chrisisall
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Hey, wait a minute! I resemble that!
Yeah, that is a great thread. But it's something I need to really think about - bend my mind ... in new directions ... must ... try ... to ... hang ...
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Signym:
And so here we are, playing the lifeboat game: only so much oil, only so much food, only so much capacity in the carbon cycle to go around. Some of this is inevitably as a result of our increasing (world) population- there does seem to be a limit on what can be farmed, raised, fished and cut. But in terms of energy sources for the mechanization that that has made us so productive (and our lives so much easier) there are alternatives to oil: conservation, solar power, and hydrogen for example. Take conservation: we could raise CAFE (vehicle fuel efficiency) standards by 10% (easily done), convert power transmission from AC to DC which saves at least 10%, subsidize home insulation, invest in mass transportation (how about land-ferries that use rail lines?), convert our power generating plants to turbines with waste-heat recovery, and take conservation into account with land-use plans. Hydrogen, as ity turns out, can be easily produced from "wet" ethanol using a cerium catalyst, and also from water using solar power. There should be be no reason why an oil shortage has us over a barrel, so to speak.
Yay. Well put.
Here's some more:
1. We now have giant battery cells which you can put in your basement and attach to solar cells on the roof. This conversion costs about $10K per household and it's spreading here in upstate new york. It makes a house entirely self sufficient. And we have all electric heat here, and last night it was 20 below zero, so trust me when I say we use a lot of power.
2. There are windmill farms, a la burt rutan, springing up around here, and entire towns and their industries can be supported by them, this is a working reality here in hickland, not a dreamt up fantasy. This can even power some moderate industry.
3. The toyota prius with a few mods can be upgraded to 250mpg. It was originally going to sell with these mods in place until the oil companies lobbied Toyota to prevent them from doing it. There's a company here that adds them for you, they've done it on about 10,000 vehicles. This also has an all electric switch so you use no gas if all you do in a day is drive half an hour to work each day, and then you can swing it back into gas mode for long drives.
These are cheap solutions if taken over the long haul, especially when compared to maintaining a constant military presence in the middle east. I remember reading somewhere on a lefty blog that the Bush admin had cost us $27K per household. I don't doubt that it's true, and that's just in five years. Think of the cost of the next 15 years of this kind of policy.
Plus, the admin push to have US automakers move away from this sort of thing is bankrupting Ford and GM. These companies subsist on govt. contracts, so don't think for a second the admin doesn't have this kind of pull. When this happens we are definitely going to see a little unhappiness on Wall Street.
If you want to talk expense, look at the total cost in the stock market that these policies have cost us.
By not persuing aggressive growth policy for US companies, all US companies, not just a few sweethearts, we have made investing in America less attractive. This bad policy of not heeding tax®ulation differences and the resulting outsourcing problem started with Clinton but Bush has exacerbated or at least continued that policy.
The market alone had lost over seven trillion in value and is still down over five trillion in value, to say nothing of lost growth potential.
But it gets worse. When you look at how Bush's deficit spending fiscal policy has effected the US dollar, it has slashed the value by nearly 50% vs. other world currencies. Some of this is flux, but at least half of it is outside of the usual cyclical flow. When absolute buying power is figured in, it tops 50%. Paring it down and giving Bush the benefit of extreme bad luck on the cyclical timing, you'd still have to accept a minimum of 30% currency devaluation of all net assets held by Americans in dollars.
The total net dollar asse
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:Quote:Is different from standard of living. GDP does not take into account money distribution. Geezer, you should know better.
gross domestic products
I know enough to read not only the entire NY Times article, but also the Timbro report. It ain't just GDP. The report also addresses standard of living. Please actually check out the links before you get all smarmy.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Hydrogen, as it turns out, can be easily produced from "wet" ethanol using a cerium catalyst, and also from water using solar power.
I forgot to slam this idea. I think it's good to get all these ideas out. But turning farmland into an energy source as ethanol would be a worldwide ecological disaster and is just so much worse an idea than simply burning hydrocarbons that, well, it makes me lean toward the hummus offensive.
But the solar/battery solution is very workable, plus wind, all sorts of things. I'm also a fan of more nuclear if necessary. It's very clean and efficient. But only where it's needed. Cities maybe.
This reminded me.
I just read the worst idea I think I've ever heard: Stop global warming by creating a giant plankton carbon sink. There are many variations of this plan, but then all involve drastically altering the composition of ocean life to alter teh rate at which plankton takes in co2. The wonderful thing is that plankton is most rapidly evolving community of species on the planet, in part because it has constant fluid congegation with the planets largest DNA database. So, a rapidly evolving, potentially unstoppable force could be modified to take in much more co2. The best endgame I ran into was: what if we can't shut it off? well we'd basically throw the world into a permanent ice age. Sweet. Anyway this now tops 'Invade and occupy the middle east to secure our energy needs' as the worst solution to a current problem.
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Good Grief! That's the last time I ever try to say anything positive about Real World Events, or anything at all.
I was really shocked at how upset everyone is getting over this, with Dreamtrove even starting to throw around "Commie b-stard" type accusations at me and Hayward! Amazing!
Yes, you're right that there's a big difference between the Chinese people and the government, and I was talking about the people, because I'm not interested in politics. Neither are they---they all say they love peace and hate war.
Just for the record, Inner Mongolia is a Chinese province, but Mongolia (Outer Mongolia)is an independent country, nothing to do with China (look on a map). As for Malaysia, millions of Chinese immigrants happen to live there, just like millions live in the USA, so of course there's some Chinese cultural influence! Good thing, too!
Remember that people always used to get hysterical about the Russian threat, too, and look what happened to that.
I just think people shouldn't get so hot under the collar about everything, and should think more about international cooperation, because we are all on this beautiful little planet together.
Goodbye---it was nice talking to you...
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Geezer,
And yet, the both the report and the article on the report consistently base their conclusions on 'per capita purchasing power', a faulty statistic. As SignyM pointed out, this number averages corporate and institutional numbers into individual ones.
It does not look at real WAGES, nor at purchases made by default - for example, health insurance and health care, transportation or education expenses picked up by US consumers in a larger share than by EU ones.
Further, it does not look at the normal measures of quality of life - average level of education, literacy, etc.
Finally, it does not address social mobility, which is low and dropping in the US and England, but higher in other countries.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Nellie,
Didn't mean to offend anyone, but what I said and the rest of this was light compared to normal banter here, which is suprisingly light compared to normal banter anywhere else. People here are more civil than I've seen just about anywhere. But we are not going to always agree.
Re: Mongolgia. Surprisingly I was not actually pulling this out of my ass. China and the USSR spent many years mucking around in mongolian politics, but my reference was to that and the annexation of inner mongolia in 1947 with Mao's USSR sponsored soviet republic of china, etc. That a nation was formerly party of an empire ruled from within your country is not a good reason for annexation, because if that were so, then every place in the world is owned four times over and the war would never end.
Re: China. As I said, I'm related to some of them, and know a great many more. They sometimes have a serious interest in politics. I know a couple of people who spent time in prison, one for twenty years because they disagreed with one of Mao's mad mandates of how healthcare was to be administered. They had previously served in his revolution, but that apparently was worth nothing when dissent was uttered.
This isn't hysteria. Ten million people are dead because of Chinese agression, and it isn't even slowing down. What's going to happen if there's an uprising in Taiwan over the disassembling of their democratic govt.? This is a very likely scenario. I think there is a lot of cause for genuine concern.
There was a lot of cause for genuine concern with the Soviet Union, a nation that killed 30 million of it's own people and conquered and robotized at least a dozen sovereign nations and fed revolutions in at least a dozen more to the same end.
I like peace as much as the next guy, more even, but when you're in a room with a loonie with an AK-47, the peaceful solution is not to wait and see if he kills everyone.
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