Monday, February 11, 2008

A Con Job Versus Wishful Thinking

The absences serious policy discussion in the vacuous election campaign made me think about the CON Job, were con indicates coal, oil, and nuclear. Other than a brief mention of the ridiculous tax subsidies that the cons get, nobody has said anything serious about global warming, which brings me to wishful thinking, where the wish is Wind, Solar, and Hydrogen -- assuming that the hydrogen comes from reasonable sources, such as a recent story about using bacteria, instead of nukes, to produce hydrogen.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

don't know about those bacteria. seems more likely you could train plankton to take sea water and co2 to make slime on an industrial scale with more effect on global warming (i have no idea if the scale required would be practical, but the point would be not to try to salt the sea with nutrients and destroy ecosystems, but do it in a controlled place and just keep removing the product.. etc.)

meanwhile the most sane response to global warming as well as other problems is to look for major ways to conserve. i can think of a few. but have no more hope of selling them, than i could sell nehru jackets. for the same reason.

Michael Perelman said...

The bacteria work is still in the initial stages in the laboratory, but it appears that they are able to convert just about any carbon form to energy, creating electricity to make hydrogen -- with virtually no outside energy needed to run the process.

Anonymous said...

perelman

sounds good. do we wait for it?