To stop our climate-change-driven suicide, Congress must stop allowing oil exports, end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and promote clean American energy
I get all the stats and the insanity part of this Report, but you said the reason why to end fossil fuel subsidies at the beginning---it's the right thing to do.
That's the message we must send to the youth fighting for their future. We owe it to them to show our solidarity and sincere concern for what we have done. It's "adulting", it's being a good example, and it's putting our money where our mouth is. If we want a legacy in the form of a livable planet, we should try to save the world alongside these kids and the scientists.
No more blah blah blah. We have to do this work, because Greta can't be everywhere.
The fact is clear that Thom doesn't know oil that well. He gets a lot right, but a lot more wrong.
I spent 35 years in oil, mostly consulting outside the USA. I've consulted witt pretty much every major oil company. There is not one oil company on earth that I know of that thinks they can force people to buy oil by increasing the supply. Not one.
I'm frankly surprised that Thom thinks supply side economics works. Supply side economics is also known as "trickle down" or "reaganomics" or the term most actual economists use "Total Bullshirt".
Markets are demand driven. Oil companies supply oil, and NEVER drill until there is a large enough gap between supply and demand to drive up price.
If you want people to quit burning fossil fuels, which is MY goal, increasing the price of oil will do it, but Americans will scream about how they are being "ripped off". OK, so we decrease the price of oil, as 85% of Americans want, and the Democrats. There is only one possible way for the oil industry to decrease the price, increase supply. The oil industry can't do ANYTHING to make customers demand less oil.
So, how do we solve this?
Reaching back into my MBA training, the answer is obvious. In the MBA we learn a valuable - but totally obvious fact - incentives drive actions. So, CHANGE THE INCENTIVES.
Removing the corporate welfare going to oil won't do anything but increase cost. We need to reduce demand.
Here is one solution,
1. Implement a federal tax credit to allow the deduction of the ENTIRE COST of solar cells from taxes, and allow home owners to carry anything unused forward. That way installation is free.
2, Implement a federal tax credit to reimburse power companies for purchasing power from rooftop solar for the first 7 years. Since the solar is free to the owner, the power company doesn't need to lose money on this, our goal is to make fossil fuel power plants unprofitable so they get shut down.
3. Implement a federal tax credit on the purchase of electric cars, make it 100% of the price of the cheapest electric car.
5. Fully support the offer made by US oil companies a year ago to produce clean renewable fuels and substitute them for gasoline and diesel. They can do it right now, and the only reason they aren't [doing it] is because they need a federal law to standardize on the clean renewable fuel so they all sell fuel that any vehicle can use.
In very few years, nobody will be burning fossil oil.
I'll tell you what CANNOT work. If we tax the crap out of oil companies, the price of gasoline will go UP and all of us consumers will be sending more of our income to the federal government. That is silly. If we stop exporting US oil, pretty much nothing will change, a tiny few contracts will be rearranged to buy elsewhere, but again, oil is a demand driven market, supply side economics are bullshirt, and reducing supply won't reduce demand unless it increases price, and even then most demand is inelastic so it will just make everyone poorer without reducing oil demand. If we get the KSA to increase oil extraction, first we will find out THEY CAN'T, but also it will just rearrange supply because - ONE LAST TIME - oil is a demand driven market, supply side economics DO NOT WORK, and reducing supply won't reduce demand unless it increases price, and even then most demand is inelastic so it will just make everyone poorer without reducing oil demand.
Again, if you want people to do something, incentivize it. Only 2% of us and really only 2% with plenty of income, can increase our transportation cost without having to slash elsewhere.
You have to offer a CHEAPER alternative, and you can't tell an illiterate family of laborers to just run out and buy a Tesla.
You do make a solid argument, though I have come across it before. The one point I would consider unhelpful would be encouraging the refining of renewable fuels. The one renewable I could possibly continence would be cooking oils. All others can only come from our food supply, or at the cost of razing millions of acres of rain forest. I have watched it happen continuously since renewable biological fuels came into the picture. Yes, it started with cooking oils in backyard diesel fuel refineries, and that is where it should have stayed.
One of the first thing I learned in kung fu, which I went on to teach for many years, was: Never go into power. Hence, provide incentives. Another way is to simply go around the problem. For that we can turn to "regenerative farming." I have mentioned it before in these comments, but perhaps it will find a fresh set or two of eyes. It is not a new technique, having been around for decades, and it has proven its worth over and over again, both in savings of around 75% in the cost of farming, no longer needing irrigation short of a severe drought, and then only about 10% of what would otherwise be required, double, and eventually (like three or four years), triple yields, and double nutritional value. It works in orchards just as well as fields. It works by using probiotics for the soil, which also go to work deepening the available top soil, further reducing water requirements. And the real show-stopper: It sequesters huge amounts of carbon! If two thirds of arable land world-wide were to be so farmed, the whole fossil fuel argument would become moot. So why isn't everyone doing it?
The USDA provides grants and apps to help manage and track progress while practicing regenerative farming, but it still does not seem to get out there. I donate to a number of non-profits dedicated to finding solutions to climate change, but no one there talks about regenerative farming there either. I know there is a "list of negatives," but it seems to be that they have little substance, such as cattle so raised require antibiotics to fatten up. So, raise a few more cows, and sell the ones you have as being healthier to consume. Management of manure is considered another negative, but I cannot fathom how. The whole idea of regenerative farming is to wean the soil from any need for fertilizer input as the soil becomes more healthy. If there is more manure around than is needed, it can composted for a few months before going to county green waste recyclers to add to their soil amendment products. If you remember Al Capp's Shmoo character in L'il Abner, you will see what I see in this form of farming.
Excellent and well presented reply. I have been "into" alternative energy since taking a graduate level course in college. I loved Engineering so much that instead of taking easy course, I asked the Dean if I could take graduate level Engineering courses. He agreed, I did, and I'd recommend the same to everyone. He pointed me to broad courses like "Advancement of Alternative Energy", by Dr. Green (seriously, that was his name).
Anyway, used cooking oil can power maybe one car per 3 LARGE restaurants. It's great idea to utilize the cooking oil, but it's not practical for mass use. Growing bio-fuel is practical, but it's not cost effective unless done in methods that require a combination of water and sunlight that are rare.
What I'm talking about is totally different, Ammonia. Two major oil companies announced that they can now make fuel from AIR. Yep, AIR. It's not just air, they also need water, but here is the method. We've used "oxygen generators" in the oil field for decades. They basically take in air, expel the Nitrogen, and what is left works nearly as well as pure oxygen for rough work like cutting steel - you end up with a rougher edge but the oxygen is free and there are no logistics getting stuff to wherever you are.
Anyway, Ammonia is NH3. To make it, you start with a solar powered "oxygen generator machine" and solar powered splitting Hydrogen from salty water. Most of the planet has a layer of salty water anywhere you drill, it's not rare.
If you capture the Nitrogen rather than the Oxygen from the "oxygen generator machine", then pass it along with the hydrogen from splitting salt water, over a bed of rust, you get Ammonia. It's not 100% free, but it's super cheap, and uses almost no land. You can literally have enough solar cells on and around gas station to self-fill the tanks.
Will it work? Yes indeed, the only problem is Ammonia has different combustion characteristics than gasoline. You need a 50% larger fuel tank on the car and a special ID engine, lower compression, different materials, etc. What the oil companies said is Ammonia fuel needs a federal standard so it's the same everywhere. They will do the rest.
The proof is in operation. For some time now, maybe a year or two, but a while, a commercial ship has sailed back and forth across the Pacific powered by an Ammonia-diesel mix. It is working perfectly. They are looking at ideas like going 100% Ammonia, but that isn't proven yet - a mix is proven.
This is not a practical long term solution. Electric cars have 1% of the parts, and simplicity always wins, but this may be a great way to transition. If we could keep IC engined cars but switch to a zero carbon exhaust, it buys us time to go electric. As much as we'd all like to be electric tomorrow, it's not physically possible.
As Obama said, a 100% solution would be great but fifty 2% solutions still achieves 100%, and allows 98% failure of ideas while finding one that saves the planet.
As for your "regenerative farming", it's really a no-brainer. I have a Danish friend who ran a "chicken ranch", an idea he got from an American we worked with. He was doing OK until Denmark suddenly forced him to "go organic". He swapped careful steam cleaning for saturating the buildings with chemicals. That quadrupled his cleaning time, but cost dropped 99%. He had more pennies at the end of the month despite losing a couple of days to cleaning. He quit feeding the birds chemicals, and his loss rate went way up - but he was saving more on chemicals. Then he went to market and the bottom offer was twice what he sold for previously. He was able to retire from our industry and become a full time chicken wrangler, WHILE ELIMINATING CHEMICALS.
This applies to your argument as follows, my friend would never have "gone organic" on his own. He believed decades of lies about "better living through chemistry".
We need strong government incentives to get people to do the obvious a few times. If you have done much teaching you know that while it's sad, it's true that most people really are immune to preaching. You really do have to shove them out into the blizzard naked.
Thanks, Lew, for the very informative reply. If ammonia could ever be used by itself, it would be the cleanest fuel possible! I hope that continues as a goal. In the meantime, I'm just going to hope that ammonia makes up the larger part of the fuel mixture, but that will no doubt depend upon which engine emerges as the gold standard.
So persuasion might not be enough to see everybody climb onboard the green train. I would have thought that anxiety might do the trick, but it seems those with climate anxiety are not in a position to do anything more than I am about agriculture. I was hoping that the USDA would sponsor a substantial experimental farm using regenerative techniques, and set up computer feed back on all phases such farming in comparison to commercial as a whole, and chemically-driven monoculture corporate farming as well, all while taking note the condition of the soil the experimental farm begins with. Labor would be part of the stats, as well as costs and market benefits. Thank you for bringing all that up with your friend's experience. I think it might be time for me to start writing some letters. As Thom says, Tag! You're it!
Ditto, never heard of regenerative farming, but really it just sounds like farming. One of the things rarely mentioned is how many barrels of toxic chemicals the US captured from IG Farben, and which ended up being marketed as "pesticide" and 'herbicide". Easy quick profits drove lying marketing.
Fonda (my lovely wife) and I have marched, written, called, whatever since the mid 1970s, and accomplished almost nothing. AGW, failing farms, wars, all of those are symptoms of the actual disease, which is rarely mentioned. Overpopulation is the real issue. If we suddenly went 100% green tomorrow, it would just delay extinction. As I tell everyone who feels like making bored faces and checking their watches, we have already made ourselves extinct, the only question is how long we have left. There is no way on earth you can get humans to stop breeding like rabbits. People actually consider it a RIGHT.
The issue with Ammonia as fuel is cost. Not the fuel, the equipment. You can burn 100% ammonia, but it requires a lower compression ratio and puts out less power than gasoline. That means a larger engine and fuel tank and you couldn't burn anything else, which is why potential suppliers want the government to standardize like they did for gasoline in 1910 or so. It needs a lot of government support to switch, and while I haven't done a study, I suspect it's cheaper to jump past ammonia to electric cars. With the new lithium recycling process, electric cars got a huge boost.
One issue I see with electric cars is recharging. People want a reasonable range, which means lots of batteries, which means lost passenger space, higher cost and weight, plus 200 days a year you are paying for extra battery capacity you don't need..
I've wondered for some time why they don't make a small generator trailer that you can hook up for long trips to make the car an on-demand hydbrid. Have it burn ammonia.
Regenerative farming has been around for a while. I think it's start was when wheat fields began to replace prairie in the western plains states. Little moisture and wind were problems. Not tilling solved it, at the cost of keeping the soil in very good shape. I do not know if they had some homemade probiotics or not, but I'll bet they learned a lot about how to use manure and created the probiotics that way.
From IG Farben. Of course. Zyklon-B. Pesticide. How many vegetable gardeners and small farmers ever thought about the stuff they were spraying out of their nozzles killed 6 million Jews and another 3 million people of various scape-goated groups. And that's how this nightmare began.
As I remember the '70s, we were starting to get a grip on population growth. The UN, with a lot of financial help from the US, had opened women's clinics all over the world. It was revolutionizing how people lived in India and Africa. For thousands of years, the poor had as many children as they could as their form of Social Security. Children died. They needed enough to support them in their old age. But then not so many of them were dying, but the culture was there - until the women stepped in, and it was the women's clinics that made it happen. China had its own solution, not the best. Then the '80s came along, and Reagan, who shut off the funds going to the clinics for religious reasons. I cannot truly say how much damage that did, but it had to be a lot. I remember thinking at the time that Reagan had just signed the Earth's death warrant.
I like the idea of a regenerating trailer, but I also know IC engines. If they are not run regularly, and under load, seals dry up and start to leak. Easily solved, however. Owners simply need to charge their car from the trailer once a week, and all should be good.
FYI, I know from chasing leaking seals on 5MW ship propulsion units that about 20 years ago seals became available that don't dry out or interact with lubricating oil, and have a long service life, decades of continuous operation. They are expensive, but they are available. It's likely cost would drop with quantity
Wow! That gal is resourceful! Love it! And old Nortons never die - they just become fire trucks for kids!
I rode a lot of roads in the mountains of Southern California when I lived there. Loved it! Went out every weekend. Got a part time job writing for Cycle News - looking back, I couldn't really call it writing, but people read it and were pleased to meet me when I was out reporting, and it did encourage me to become a full time writer, which I did for 18 years, before going into healing with the chi we used in T'ai Chi Chuan.
Which makes me think, regarding your dizziness from COVID: It sounds like vestibular disorientation, which means it has affected your inner ear and your brain stem. I recognize it as I have it too, beginning about 26 years ago. That was when I first fell on my butt executing Fair Lady Works Shuttle, a series of three 280 degree spins with a combination of blocks/strikes against four attackers. I realized immediately I needed to be very watchful over my verticality. I could no longer ignore the fact that performing T'ai Chi into late dusk was a challenge. I really needed a horizon I could fix on. It was the diabetes, which I had already been dealing with for 30 years. For a lot of us, it affects the brain stem and the middle ear. I continued to ride, and I was fine as long as I was moving, but I had to start watching my stops. I could still balance at stop signs for 2 - 3 seconds without putting my feet down, but I had to really pay attention. But it has steadily gotten worse, and now that I haven't ridden since February of last year, I'm wary of trying. I know I don't want to do on my old 890 lb. behemoth, as comfortable as it always was. I would lack the leg strength do deal with any slight tipping I failed to notice. Now my son, who has always wanted to go riding with me, is dying to get on the road with me, him on his Harley full dresser, and me on his 2,000 cc V-twin Big Dog, his pride and joy. It will be considerably lighter, that is for sure, but I'd sure like to ride a beater around a parking lot at very low speeds, with non-dab stops, before I got on that baby.
BTW, I'm still curious as to how this young woman managed to convert pieces of a camshaft into axles. Did she mill off the lobes? Sure hope they weren't too eccentric! Or maybe the kids LIKED the lobes, if they were on the mild side. What a ride!
I used to go to school in Missouri, Tarkio College. A small Presbyterian school where folks back east sent their kids when they couldn't get into the Ivy League schools. I got a full scholarship, everything but food and books, on account of I could get straight A's and keep their averages up for the stats. Made some very wealthy friends. One invited me to go to the South Pacific with him to have a custom schooner built from teak, put together an all-girl crew and sail around the world. His family owned an importing business. I smoked a pipe, and they brought in Dutch tobacco. He always said he wanted to send me a big sample box, and I'll be damned if he didn't! I was managing a head shop in Capitola, California, when one day a mysterious box with no return address showed up, years after Tarkio, and it was chock full of two-ounce packages of Dutch tobacco! Oh, the boat? I was married! My wife was already in California, serving an internship at the Sawtelle VA hospital, and I intended to join her as soon as I could, and I did. Hence, my time in the southlands of California.
Which reminds me, since I have lived in Northern California for the past 55 years. Two oil refineries have just been granted permission to convert to producing alternative fuels, but it's the wrong stuff - soy beans and animal fats. We are all very disappointed. Sheer greenwashing. It will not help the environment one whit, if it doesn't make things worse, and the communities around them will suffer the same problems they always had. It's very sad.
I get all the stats and the insanity part of this Report, but you said the reason why to end fossil fuel subsidies at the beginning---it's the right thing to do.
That's the message we must send to the youth fighting for their future. We owe it to them to show our solidarity and sincere concern for what we have done. It's "adulting", it's being a good example, and it's putting our money where our mouth is. If we want a legacy in the form of a livable planet, we should try to save the world alongside these kids and the scientists.
No more blah blah blah. We have to do this work, because Greta can't be everywhere.
The fact is clear that Thom doesn't know oil that well. He gets a lot right, but a lot more wrong.
I spent 35 years in oil, mostly consulting outside the USA. I've consulted witt pretty much every major oil company. There is not one oil company on earth that I know of that thinks they can force people to buy oil by increasing the supply. Not one.
I'm frankly surprised that Thom thinks supply side economics works. Supply side economics is also known as "trickle down" or "reaganomics" or the term most actual economists use "Total Bullshirt".
Markets are demand driven. Oil companies supply oil, and NEVER drill until there is a large enough gap between supply and demand to drive up price.
If you want people to quit burning fossil fuels, which is MY goal, increasing the price of oil will do it, but Americans will scream about how they are being "ripped off". OK, so we decrease the price of oil, as 85% of Americans want, and the Democrats. There is only one possible way for the oil industry to decrease the price, increase supply. The oil industry can't do ANYTHING to make customers demand less oil.
So, how do we solve this?
Reaching back into my MBA training, the answer is obvious. In the MBA we learn a valuable - but totally obvious fact - incentives drive actions. So, CHANGE THE INCENTIVES.
Removing the corporate welfare going to oil won't do anything but increase cost. We need to reduce demand.
Here is one solution,
1. Implement a federal tax credit to allow the deduction of the ENTIRE COST of solar cells from taxes, and allow home owners to carry anything unused forward. That way installation is free.
2, Implement a federal tax credit to reimburse power companies for purchasing power from rooftop solar for the first 7 years. Since the solar is free to the owner, the power company doesn't need to lose money on this, our goal is to make fossil fuel power plants unprofitable so they get shut down.
3. Implement a federal tax credit on the purchase of electric cars, make it 100% of the price of the cheapest electric car.
5. Fully support the offer made by US oil companies a year ago to produce clean renewable fuels and substitute them for gasoline and diesel. They can do it right now, and the only reason they aren't [doing it] is because they need a federal law to standardize on the clean renewable fuel so they all sell fuel that any vehicle can use.
In very few years, nobody will be burning fossil oil.
I'll tell you what CANNOT work. If we tax the crap out of oil companies, the price of gasoline will go UP and all of us consumers will be sending more of our income to the federal government. That is silly. If we stop exporting US oil, pretty much nothing will change, a tiny few contracts will be rearranged to buy elsewhere, but again, oil is a demand driven market, supply side economics are bullshirt, and reducing supply won't reduce demand unless it increases price, and even then most demand is inelastic so it will just make everyone poorer without reducing oil demand. If we get the KSA to increase oil extraction, first we will find out THEY CAN'T, but also it will just rearrange supply because - ONE LAST TIME - oil is a demand driven market, supply side economics DO NOT WORK, and reducing supply won't reduce demand unless it increases price, and even then most demand is inelastic so it will just make everyone poorer without reducing oil demand.
Again, if you want people to do something, incentivize it. Only 2% of us and really only 2% with plenty of income, can increase our transportation cost without having to slash elsewhere.
You have to offer a CHEAPER alternative, and you can't tell an illiterate family of laborers to just run out and buy a Tesla.
You do make a solid argument, though I have come across it before. The one point I would consider unhelpful would be encouraging the refining of renewable fuels. The one renewable I could possibly continence would be cooking oils. All others can only come from our food supply, or at the cost of razing millions of acres of rain forest. I have watched it happen continuously since renewable biological fuels came into the picture. Yes, it started with cooking oils in backyard diesel fuel refineries, and that is where it should have stayed.
One of the first thing I learned in kung fu, which I went on to teach for many years, was: Never go into power. Hence, provide incentives. Another way is to simply go around the problem. For that we can turn to "regenerative farming." I have mentioned it before in these comments, but perhaps it will find a fresh set or two of eyes. It is not a new technique, having been around for decades, and it has proven its worth over and over again, both in savings of around 75% in the cost of farming, no longer needing irrigation short of a severe drought, and then only about 10% of what would otherwise be required, double, and eventually (like three or four years), triple yields, and double nutritional value. It works in orchards just as well as fields. It works by using probiotics for the soil, which also go to work deepening the available top soil, further reducing water requirements. And the real show-stopper: It sequesters huge amounts of carbon! If two thirds of arable land world-wide were to be so farmed, the whole fossil fuel argument would become moot. So why isn't everyone doing it?
The USDA provides grants and apps to help manage and track progress while practicing regenerative farming, but it still does not seem to get out there. I donate to a number of non-profits dedicated to finding solutions to climate change, but no one there talks about regenerative farming there either. I know there is a "list of negatives," but it seems to be that they have little substance, such as cattle so raised require antibiotics to fatten up. So, raise a few more cows, and sell the ones you have as being healthier to consume. Management of manure is considered another negative, but I cannot fathom how. The whole idea of regenerative farming is to wean the soil from any need for fertilizer input as the soil becomes more healthy. If there is more manure around than is needed, it can composted for a few months before going to county green waste recyclers to add to their soil amendment products. If you remember Al Capp's Shmoo character in L'il Abner, you will see what I see in this form of farming.
Jim,
Excellent and well presented reply. I have been "into" alternative energy since taking a graduate level course in college. I loved Engineering so much that instead of taking easy course, I asked the Dean if I could take graduate level Engineering courses. He agreed, I did, and I'd recommend the same to everyone. He pointed me to broad courses like "Advancement of Alternative Energy", by Dr. Green (seriously, that was his name).
Anyway, used cooking oil can power maybe one car per 3 LARGE restaurants. It's great idea to utilize the cooking oil, but it's not practical for mass use. Growing bio-fuel is practical, but it's not cost effective unless done in methods that require a combination of water and sunlight that are rare.
What I'm talking about is totally different, Ammonia. Two major oil companies announced that they can now make fuel from AIR. Yep, AIR. It's not just air, they also need water, but here is the method. We've used "oxygen generators" in the oil field for decades. They basically take in air, expel the Nitrogen, and what is left works nearly as well as pure oxygen for rough work like cutting steel - you end up with a rougher edge but the oxygen is free and there are no logistics getting stuff to wherever you are.
Anyway, Ammonia is NH3. To make it, you start with a solar powered "oxygen generator machine" and solar powered splitting Hydrogen from salty water. Most of the planet has a layer of salty water anywhere you drill, it's not rare.
If you capture the Nitrogen rather than the Oxygen from the "oxygen generator machine", then pass it along with the hydrogen from splitting salt water, over a bed of rust, you get Ammonia. It's not 100% free, but it's super cheap, and uses almost no land. You can literally have enough solar cells on and around gas station to self-fill the tanks.
Will it work? Yes indeed, the only problem is Ammonia has different combustion characteristics than gasoline. You need a 50% larger fuel tank on the car and a special ID engine, lower compression, different materials, etc. What the oil companies said is Ammonia fuel needs a federal standard so it's the same everywhere. They will do the rest.
The proof is in operation. For some time now, maybe a year or two, but a while, a commercial ship has sailed back and forth across the Pacific powered by an Ammonia-diesel mix. It is working perfectly. They are looking at ideas like going 100% Ammonia, but that isn't proven yet - a mix is proven.
This is not a practical long term solution. Electric cars have 1% of the parts, and simplicity always wins, but this may be a great way to transition. If we could keep IC engined cars but switch to a zero carbon exhaust, it buys us time to go electric. As much as we'd all like to be electric tomorrow, it's not physically possible.
As Obama said, a 100% solution would be great but fifty 2% solutions still achieves 100%, and allows 98% failure of ideas while finding one that saves the planet.
As for your "regenerative farming", it's really a no-brainer. I have a Danish friend who ran a "chicken ranch", an idea he got from an American we worked with. He was doing OK until Denmark suddenly forced him to "go organic". He swapped careful steam cleaning for saturating the buildings with chemicals. That quadrupled his cleaning time, but cost dropped 99%. He had more pennies at the end of the month despite losing a couple of days to cleaning. He quit feeding the birds chemicals, and his loss rate went way up - but he was saving more on chemicals. Then he went to market and the bottom offer was twice what he sold for previously. He was able to retire from our industry and become a full time chicken wrangler, WHILE ELIMINATING CHEMICALS.
This applies to your argument as follows, my friend would never have "gone organic" on his own. He believed decades of lies about "better living through chemistry".
We need strong government incentives to get people to do the obvious a few times. If you have done much teaching you know that while it's sad, it's true that most people really are immune to preaching. You really do have to shove them out into the blizzard naked.
Again, thanks for the input.
Thanks, Lew, for the very informative reply. If ammonia could ever be used by itself, it would be the cleanest fuel possible! I hope that continues as a goal. In the meantime, I'm just going to hope that ammonia makes up the larger part of the fuel mixture, but that will no doubt depend upon which engine emerges as the gold standard.
So persuasion might not be enough to see everybody climb onboard the green train. I would have thought that anxiety might do the trick, but it seems those with climate anxiety are not in a position to do anything more than I am about agriculture. I was hoping that the USDA would sponsor a substantial experimental farm using regenerative techniques, and set up computer feed back on all phases such farming in comparison to commercial as a whole, and chemically-driven monoculture corporate farming as well, all while taking note the condition of the soil the experimental farm begins with. Labor would be part of the stats, as well as costs and market benefits. Thank you for bringing all that up with your friend's experience. I think it might be time for me to start writing some letters. As Thom says, Tag! You're it!
Ditto, never heard of regenerative farming, but really it just sounds like farming. One of the things rarely mentioned is how many barrels of toxic chemicals the US captured from IG Farben, and which ended up being marketed as "pesticide" and 'herbicide". Easy quick profits drove lying marketing.
Fonda (my lovely wife) and I have marched, written, called, whatever since the mid 1970s, and accomplished almost nothing. AGW, failing farms, wars, all of those are symptoms of the actual disease, which is rarely mentioned. Overpopulation is the real issue. If we suddenly went 100% green tomorrow, it would just delay extinction. As I tell everyone who feels like making bored faces and checking their watches, we have already made ourselves extinct, the only question is how long we have left. There is no way on earth you can get humans to stop breeding like rabbits. People actually consider it a RIGHT.
The issue with Ammonia as fuel is cost. Not the fuel, the equipment. You can burn 100% ammonia, but it requires a lower compression ratio and puts out less power than gasoline. That means a larger engine and fuel tank and you couldn't burn anything else, which is why potential suppliers want the government to standardize like they did for gasoline in 1910 or so. It needs a lot of government support to switch, and while I haven't done a study, I suspect it's cheaper to jump past ammonia to electric cars. With the new lithium recycling process, electric cars got a huge boost.
One issue I see with electric cars is recharging. People want a reasonable range, which means lots of batteries, which means lost passenger space, higher cost and weight, plus 200 days a year you are paying for extra battery capacity you don't need..
I've wondered for some time why they don't make a small generator trailer that you can hook up for long trips to make the car an on-demand hydbrid. Have it burn ammonia.
Regenerative farming has been around for a while. I think it's start was when wheat fields began to replace prairie in the western plains states. Little moisture and wind were problems. Not tilling solved it, at the cost of keeping the soil in very good shape. I do not know if they had some homemade probiotics or not, but I'll bet they learned a lot about how to use manure and created the probiotics that way.
From IG Farben. Of course. Zyklon-B. Pesticide. How many vegetable gardeners and small farmers ever thought about the stuff they were spraying out of their nozzles killed 6 million Jews and another 3 million people of various scape-goated groups. And that's how this nightmare began.
As I remember the '70s, we were starting to get a grip on population growth. The UN, with a lot of financial help from the US, had opened women's clinics all over the world. It was revolutionizing how people lived in India and Africa. For thousands of years, the poor had as many children as they could as their form of Social Security. Children died. They needed enough to support them in their old age. But then not so many of them were dying, but the culture was there - until the women stepped in, and it was the women's clinics that made it happen. China had its own solution, not the best. Then the '80s came along, and Reagan, who shut off the funds going to the clinics for religious reasons. I cannot truly say how much damage that did, but it had to be a lot. I remember thinking at the time that Reagan had just signed the Earth's death warrant.
I like the idea of a regenerating trailer, but I also know IC engines. If they are not run regularly, and under load, seals dry up and start to leak. Easily solved, however. Owners simply need to charge their car from the trailer once a week, and all should be good.
Jim,
FYI, I know from chasing leaking seals on 5MW ship propulsion units that about 20 years ago seals became available that don't dry out or interact with lubricating oil, and have a long service life, decades of continuous operation. They are expensive, but they are available. It's likely cost would drop with quantity
Wow! That gal is resourceful! Love it! And old Nortons never die - they just become fire trucks for kids!
I rode a lot of roads in the mountains of Southern California when I lived there. Loved it! Went out every weekend. Got a part time job writing for Cycle News - looking back, I couldn't really call it writing, but people read it and were pleased to meet me when I was out reporting, and it did encourage me to become a full time writer, which I did for 18 years, before going into healing with the chi we used in T'ai Chi Chuan.
Which makes me think, regarding your dizziness from COVID: It sounds like vestibular disorientation, which means it has affected your inner ear and your brain stem. I recognize it as I have it too, beginning about 26 years ago. That was when I first fell on my butt executing Fair Lady Works Shuttle, a series of three 280 degree spins with a combination of blocks/strikes against four attackers. I realized immediately I needed to be very watchful over my verticality. I could no longer ignore the fact that performing T'ai Chi into late dusk was a challenge. I really needed a horizon I could fix on. It was the diabetes, which I had already been dealing with for 30 years. For a lot of us, it affects the brain stem and the middle ear. I continued to ride, and I was fine as long as I was moving, but I had to start watching my stops. I could still balance at stop signs for 2 - 3 seconds without putting my feet down, but I had to really pay attention. But it has steadily gotten worse, and now that I haven't ridden since February of last year, I'm wary of trying. I know I don't want to do on my old 890 lb. behemoth, as comfortable as it always was. I would lack the leg strength do deal with any slight tipping I failed to notice. Now my son, who has always wanted to go riding with me, is dying to get on the road with me, him on his Harley full dresser, and me on his 2,000 cc V-twin Big Dog, his pride and joy. It will be considerably lighter, that is for sure, but I'd sure like to ride a beater around a parking lot at very low speeds, with non-dab stops, before I got on that baby.
BTW, I'm still curious as to how this young woman managed to convert pieces of a camshaft into axles. Did she mill off the lobes? Sure hope they weren't too eccentric! Or maybe the kids LIKED the lobes, if they were on the mild side. What a ride!
I used to go to school in Missouri, Tarkio College. A small Presbyterian school where folks back east sent their kids when they couldn't get into the Ivy League schools. I got a full scholarship, everything but food and books, on account of I could get straight A's and keep their averages up for the stats. Made some very wealthy friends. One invited me to go to the South Pacific with him to have a custom schooner built from teak, put together an all-girl crew and sail around the world. His family owned an importing business. I smoked a pipe, and they brought in Dutch tobacco. He always said he wanted to send me a big sample box, and I'll be damned if he didn't! I was managing a head shop in Capitola, California, when one day a mysterious box with no return address showed up, years after Tarkio, and it was chock full of two-ounce packages of Dutch tobacco! Oh, the boat? I was married! My wife was already in California, serving an internship at the Sawtelle VA hospital, and I intended to join her as soon as I could, and I did. Hence, my time in the southlands of California.
Which reminds me, since I have lived in Northern California for the past 55 years. Two oil refineries have just been granted permission to convert to producing alternative fuels, but it's the wrong stuff - soy beans and animal fats. We are all very disappointed. Sheer greenwashing. It will not help the environment one whit, if it doesn't make things worse, and the communities around them will suffer the same problems they always had. It's very sad.