Eskimo North

So far I feel pretty ambiguous about the candidates. The last presidential race, I knew I didn't want Dubya for another four years, because I knew exactly what we have now would be the result. On the other hand, Kerry kept saying, I've got all of these solutions and they're on my website. I went to Kerry's website, goals were stated, but no means of getting there. So although I voted for Kerry only because I thought he had the best hopes of keeping Bush out, I held my nose while doing so.

Most people in this country seem to be pretty much caught up with how to slice up the pie, with little attention given to the fact that the pie is shrinking and great environmental damage is resulting from the way in which we are currently baking it. When I say pie I'm really talking about the production of goods and services that we all need to survive and function as a society, food, clothing, shelter, energy, transportation, etc.

There are still many people living in poverty and fixing that requires more than a redistribution of wealth, it involves greater production of fundamental things that everyone needs, food, clean water, adequate housing, health care, etc.

The limiting factor in the worlds economic growth is energy. Global warming and the threat of peak oil both add motivations for moving away from oil as a source of energy powering our economy however, in my view the larger reason for moving away is that burning hydrocarbons for energy can never scale to the level needed to bring the world out of poverty without totally destroying our environment in the process.

A lot of people criticize Jimmy Carter, but frankly I think he did more for this country than any other president in history. It's funny to listen to the right-wing criticize him over the handling of the Iran hostage situation. What did Jimmy Carter do? He sent in the military to try to rescue them. It was a failure, that's too bad, but in my view it was the morally correct thing to do. Reagan comes into office, and he trades arms for hostages. Yep, that makes a lot of sense, give them what they want so they will know how to get things from America, just hold us hostage. I just can't follow the right-wing logic on this one at all.

That criticism aside though what Jimmie Carter did do was to help get this country started on a path away from oil and other non-renewable energy resources and towards renewables, and had that path been followed, rather than having the majority of what he put in place being gutted by the Reagan and Bush administrations that followed, we wouldn't have had 9/11 happen, because we wouldn't be involved in the middle east pissing off the Muslims, because the one thing that makes the middle east important to us, oil, wouldn't be an issue.

I want a president that is going to lead us away from oil dependency and make this country a producer, world leader, and exporter of clean renewable energy and renewable energy technology. In the 1970's, we did not have sufficient alternatives available to us to make this possible, today we do.

Of the presidential candidates, only one has shown an interest in resolving this issue and that is Ron Paul. However, I am uncomfortable with Ron Paul because I don't believe that privatization is the answer to everything. Quite the opposite, I think the privatization movement of the Bush and Reagan administrations has been a disaster. Where once we had a maintained power grid, now we've got a national disaster that nobody wants to maintain much less modernize and expand. Where we used to be the third in terms of world life expectancy, now we're down around the 70th, even though we spend more dollars per capita on health care than any other nation. Insurance companies making medical decisions has proven to be a bad thing.

Jails should not be privatized; it creates an incentive for keeping as much of the population jailed for as long as possible. Currently, 2% of the United States population is incarcerated, more on a per capita basis than any other nation in the world. Keeping people in cages should not be a corporate profit center.

So the only candidate that has shown any promise for addressing what I see as a core problem in America, our dependence upon oil for energy, is also big on privatization which I believe has already been carried too far.

Hillary, I think it would be good to see a woman elected to the office of president primarily because it would set a precedent and open up the office to a larger portion of the population giving us a broader range of credible candidates in the future. I also am in favor of a national health care system. One of thing that prevents our country from being able to adjust to changing conditions is that people are reluctant to change jobs and careers because they will lose their current health care. Republicans portray it as an issue of "choice", but right now the choice for many is, "Do I pay for health insurance, or groceries?", not which provider do I go to. I also don't see where a national system prevents you from going outside of it if you are not satisfied with what it makes available. Hillary also impresses me as the type of person who won't be eaten up by politics. The concerns I have with Hillary are, as with all the candidates except Ron Paul, she neither seems interested in or has a plan for addressing our energy situation, nor will she commit to getting us out of Iraq.

Barac Obama, strikes me as a reasonable person who might make a pretty good president overall, except that I am concern that his lack of experience will lead to his being eaten up politically and spit out the way they did Jimmy Carter. It's good to have good ideas, ideals, and morals, but if you can't be effective at getting them implemented, it's of no value. I'm further bothered by Obama's being willing to commit only to get the troops out by the end of his term. To me that's really a statement that he has no intention of doing anything about it. I think a minority getting into the office of President would also open up the field for future potential candidates and that would be good, though I really wonder about Obama's lineage. I keep hearing people refer to him as a black man, but pictures I've seen he looks about as much black as I look native American. So I can't help but wonder if he's black enough to really have that effect, that is to say to open it up for future minorities because I'm not really sure many will consider him as such.

On the Republican side, McCain again seems to think that we should stay the coarse in Iraq, and I disagree. I don't believe we can win in Iraq because I believe the war in unjust, our presence there is unjust; we are there to control and steal resources that don't belong to us; and we've maimed hundreds of thousand and killed tends of thousand in an attempt to do so. I believe that good ultimately will triumph over evil and so as long as we behave in an evil manner, we are doomed to failure. So I don't believe that war can be won, ever, and the best (and most moral) thing that we can do is cut our losses and get out. I would expect McCain, being a war veteran, having had the experience of intercepting a surface to air missile with his airplane, would see how wrong what we're doing is, and I think he probably actually does but also believes he would have no chance at the republican nomination if he admitted as much. So in my view that makes him a sell-out. He also is in favor of what most republicans seem to be in favor of, shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor and middle class, and continuing the republican agenda of completely trashing the constitution. I happen to believe the people that wrote the constitution were exceptionally wise but they saw all men as intrinsically equal which is something elitists have a problem with.

McCain made a statement, "money which people spend is good for the economy, but money which government spends is bad for it." I don't agree with this. Money spent on bombs and other things which only harm humanity is bad for the economy, it puts cash in but no consumer goods are produced so that only drives inflation. It takes labor, energy, and raw materials away from the production of goods, also driving inflation and hurting the economy.

But if the government spends money on infrastructure, for example the Bonneville Power Administrations hydroelectric projects, that employed many people providing infrastructure that was needed and helped the economy tremendously. Much of the technology that was developed by NASA or by NASA contractors during the Apollo era was very helpful to our economy.

Now, today, this country BADLY needs infrastructure upgrades. We need to improve our electric grid, interconnect the west and east halves and convert it to DC transmission. Just converting to DC would substantially improve capacity because when AC is transmitted, the peak voltage and current is 1.414 times the average voltage, so the line voltage can be run at only 70% of the voltage rating of the insulators. With DC, it can be run at 100% because the peak and average voltage are the same. So right there you get a 140% boost in capacity. Another factor that limits capacity with AC transmission is line sag. As current increases, the warmer wire stretches. As it stretches, the physical length of the line gets longer causing a phase shift which causes power to be connected out of phase turning the transmission lines into giant heaters. This limits the current carrying capacity to values lower than what it otherwise could be. DC transmission eliminates this issue.

DC lines eliminate radiation loss, and also the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and higher operating voltage reduces copper loss. Because there is no radiation from DC transmission lines, there doesn't need to be as much space around them and so the land right-of-way costs are less. DC power transmission lines ELIMINATE space weather induced failures, and they ELIMINATE cascading grid failure. DC transmission lines also permit interconnecting grids of different frequencies, say 50Hz used by some countries and 60hz used in North America. With AC these can't be connected, but with DC transmission systems they can.

A nation wide efficient transmission network would allow the use of wind energy, which is currently less expensive than any fossil fuel derived energy, to be used at a much higher level because the geographical diversity afforded by efficient transmission would even out variable output from various wind power sources. The same is true for solar, tidal, and other intermittent renewable sources. Money spent by the government to put this in place would be very good for our economy.

Railroads have been neglected to death in this country and I think this is a major mistake. North America is the only region of the world where the rails haven't been electrified to a substantial degree. Our trains run mostly on diesel. Our trucks run mostly on diesel. If our supply of diesel is interrupted, we all starve. Bad plan. An electrified railway allows trains to be run on any available energy source, solar, nuclear fission, geothermal, wind, natural gas, whatever. An electrified rail system providing the bulk of our freight transportation would provide us with the security of knowing we can still get food on the table somehow.

Nuclear fusion development, this is an area where in the 70's we didn't have the technology to get there; today we largely do. We are putting far too little resources into making it a reality. The amount of money we've committed to ITER over the 25 year lifespan of the project, amounts to less than what we spend on imported oil in TWO DAYS. For so little to be given to something that has the potential for eliminating our energy needs forever and providing us the energy to clean up our environment, provide as much clean water as we need to everyone around the globe, which in turn would allow much land that is too arid to be arable to become productive, is just completely insane. But there are also far more promising approaches than a standard Tokamak.

ITER was an extremely bad choice of design for an international fusion test reactor. For starters, a conventional Tokamak is a physically large machine, probably too large to find a commercial market. To be sure, it technically can be made to work, but only at power levels exceeding about half a gigawatt. For an established technology this would be acceptable although power companies prefer to install capacity in smaller chunks. But it's not an established technology and that's going to make private investment scarce at first.

Tokamak reactors are the most advanced in terms of operating experience, but a spherical or short-aspect ratio Tokamak has significantly better confinement properties than a standard design, allowing a much smaller machine to achieve break-even, and allowing commercial reactors that are on a scale investors would be more willing to gamble on. Furthermore, an existing design for a spherical Tokamak power reactor exists that was made by the same group of scientists and engineers that designed the START and MAST reactors, both of which exceeded design specifications.

Aside from Tokamak reactors, there are a number of notable alternatives that, unlike Tokamak reactors, promise to be inexpensive and to be able to "burn" (fuse) aneutronic fuels, that is fuels which produce no neutrons and thus do not cause reactor components to become radio active or result in neutron embriddlement. The most notable of these is the polywell or Bussard reactor; a very very clever design that combines the advantages of the Farnsworth fusor which uses electrostatic confinement and acceleration to fuse elements. The Farnsworth fusor is limited to a couple of watts of power because of the use of grids which get destroyed by ion bombardment at higher power levels. Thus, which it can serve as a neutron source, it can not be scaled to power levels useful for power production. The Bussard reactor replaces the physical grids with virtual grids created by steering electrons with magnetic fields. Because only electrons, which are 1/2000th the mass of a proton, need to be steered magnetically, the magnetic field requirements are much smaller than a Tokamak, and so conventional copper coils can be used, no need for exotic materials. Because particles are accelerated through a fixed electrostatic field, they all have exactly the ideal amount of energy required for fusion to occur, rather than a random thermal distribution. This makes the device much more efficient and allows energy levels required for aneutronic fuels to be easily achieved. Six Bussard reactors have been designed and, built, tested, and a 7th has just been built, and if this reactor meets design objectives, a commercial power reactor is next. Bussard reactors can be built for around 12 million and use no exotic materials, this is what makes them extremely attractive if the technology works as envisioned. This kind of reactor would be safe (creating and using no radioactive materials and producing only helium as a waste product), long lived, no neutrons means no neutron embriddlement, and extremely efficient (because all products are charged particles, electricity can be generated through a reverse plasma-hydrodynamics process rather than through thermal conversion achieving efficiencies as high as 80% or about twice that of thermal conversion designs). This is something that government money should be spent on. Other promising reactors include the levitating toroid and z-pinch reactors. Although these later designs are more expensive, they do share the potential for using aneutronic fuels.

There are technologies for converting sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into butynol, a four carbon alcohol that can be directly substituted for gasoline in a conventional unmodified gasoline powered car. It has a road octane of 94, an energy of 115,000 BTU's gallon, but burns more efficiently than gasoline so in testing has produced better mileage and power than gasoline while reducing emissions by 97%. One of these technologies is being explored by Richard Branson as an alternative renewable jet fuel for Virgin Airlines. He is funding a private research effort using a device that is sort of a reverse fuel cell, taking electricity, water, and carbon dioxide and producing butynol. Sandia labs is taking a different approach, they are splitting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen using concentrated sunlight, then combining the carbon monoxide and steam to produce butynol, ethanol, and a variety of other hydrocarbons.

These are things that public money should be invested in. Solving our energy problems will solve our economic problems, and solutions developed here will have applications around the globe. This is an opportunity for us to restore our manufacturing sector of our economy, only doing so in a green fashion.

But none of the presidential candidates talk of these things, except Ron Paul, and I've already expressed my concerns there; things would could really solve our economic woes, instead we get silly stimulus packages, which only can drive inflation if there isn't a corresponding increase in the production of consumer goods; which without fixing our energy woes, and without wasting resources on war, can't happen.

So there's my take right now; unless someone else enters the field; it neither looks terribly promising, but by the same token I don't think any of the candidates are really extremely terrible either. I'll probably end up voting for Hillary or Obama, but I'd really like to see a real leader who has the knowledge and the moral strength to address the infrastructure issues of this country and I don't see that as a likely.

I'm not feeling ambiguous anymore.

After watching how things have developed, and spending some time looking at some things Barack Obama has written, blog and website material, and watching John McCain speak, and after seeing the pick in running mates; I'm really feeling much better about Barack Obama than John McCain.

With John McCain, I see a guy who appears to be in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's, very much like Reagan heading into his second term. He is stumbles on sentences, seems to confuse different issues, and in general seems to only be able to deal fluidly with issues that are thirty years in the past.

In my view the biggest single issue affecting this country is energy. I know a lot of people would say the economy, but it is energy that underlies our economic woes. We have an economic system that can only function in the face of continuous growth. A growing economy demands a growing energy supply and while there is still a large amount of hydrocarbons in the ground, they are getting increasingly expensive to get at, their use has negative environmental impacts, and their use can't be scaled to meet our growing energy needs. McCain does not have as good of a grasp on the energy options available to us as does Obama and McCain does not seem to have a solid understanding of the relationship between our economy and energy.

Then his choice of running mates; Sarah Palin, and two things are very clear; she hasn't the experience, knowledge, or intelligence, to serve as vice president, and she's got serious ethics issues that come out in incidents like Troopergate and the incident with the Wasilla librarian.

It is my contention that John McCain does not have the energy or motivational ability to move this country out of the current downward spiral that it is in, and Sarah Palin isn't qualified to be Vice President let alone president.

When you look at the fact that John McCain is 72 years old and has already had a number of malignant cancers (I've read four from one source, five from another), his odds statistically of making it through his first term aren't very good and that means our odds of having Sarah Palin for president are far too good for my comfort. The thought of Sarah Palin appointing supreme court justices when she can't even name a single supreme court case that she disagrees with is something I find deeply discomforting.

There are a couple of issues that do bother me about Obama, particularly how he responded to the Republican's attempt to tie him to Reverend Wright; the Republicans, and Fox News in particular, repeatedly took snippets from Reverend Writes sermons, particularly the snipped, "God Bless America? No God Damn America". They took those snippets out of context, in most cases he was quoting someone else; and his history of having served in the marines is not consistent with someone who would wish ill on this country. Quite the contrary, and if people bother to watch the entire sermon, they would see that he wants this country to succeed, but you can't succeed without recognizing failures and learning from them.

It troubled me the way Obama distanced himself from Reverend Wright instead of pointing out that the Republicans had used the sound bytes out of context to intentionally mislead; but I also understand that the American public has too short of an attention span to listen and comprehend such an explanation so it was politically expedient, but in my opinion, wrong.

The second thing that bothers me is his pick of running mate; Joe Biden. I understand why he picked him, as a counter to the republicans claim that he didn't have enough experience in international affairs, however, I feel that was a mistake. He needs someone who has enough experience and energy to help implement his policies, and he needs to have someone as a running mate who shares his passion for change. Joseph Biden has passed legislation that appears to me to favor the interests of big business over the common person, and I think we need quite the opposite, someone who will protect people from the abuses of these mega-multinational corporations.

Now on the plus side, I believe our largest issue in this country and in the world today is energy and I believe Obama understands this. Most of the political agendas seem concerned with the distribution of wealth, but there seems to be very little concern with the creation of wealth. We've lost our manufacturing base, and now much of our service industry has been outsourced to foreign countries.

What we've done is instead of paying for what we import with exports; we've manipulated the markets by continuously increasing the money supply. Countries that export to us have floated our debt in order to keep exporting to us; otherwise the value of the dollar would have fallen, relative to foreign currencies, long ago, which would have cut our consumption and increased the attractiveness of our products on the international market. But we've now reached a point where nobody is willing to continue to float that debt, and would would have been a soft gradual adjustment is now a crash.

We now import close to 70% of the oil we use and that makes everything we do expensive. It makes what used to be a strong export for us, food; more expensive to grow, process, and transport, and so the largest export is now becoming unattractive on the world market.

In order to turn this around we must become energy self sufficient; and this is an area where I think Obama has a very good understanding of what is necessary. The scope and the pace of McCain's energy proposals are very inadequate and they are not sufficiently comprehensive. John McCain believes that primarily we need to increase drilling, that nuclear and clean coal can play a part, and solar and wind, well ok we'll throw that in but no concrete plans to actually do something that would enable their usage at greater levels.

Obama on the other hand, was actually familiar with a development that few Americans are aware of, and that is of a device that is known as the Bussard Polywell fusion reactor. This reactor is entirely different than the Tokamak reactors that are the mainstream path to fusion. It is an ingenious design that is at least three orders of magnitude less expensive to construct than a Tokamak, and that can achieve the energy levels necessary to fuse aneutronic fuels such as hydrogen-boron. These are fuels that produce no neutrons in their reaction and only charged particles. This has two advantages, it doesn't lead to neutron activation of reactor components or neutron embriddlement, issues that ultimately limit the lifespan of fission reactors and of fusion reactors that use fuels that produce neutrons such as deuterium-tritium. Even those reactors are infinitely safer than nuclear fission reactors, they can't melt down or explode and there are no long-lived high-level radioactive wastes produced, but the Polywell reactor can get around even those levels of radioactivity though it still can't produce zero neutrons but the levels are very low.

The Polywell fusion reactor was invented by Dr. Bussard who passed away last year about this time, but it's development was funded by the US Navy, and ultimately was intended to lead to a working power reactor. The Navy was looking for a replacement for fission reactors in submarines, aircraft carriers, and other large vessels. The military advantages are huge, you can get your fuel right from the sea and basically never need refueling; you don't have to dispose of or handle radioactive waste, and in a war there is no danger of fissionable materials falling into the hands of enemies because of the reactors used in your vessels.

The Navy funded the development of six research reactors, WB1 through WB6, all six performed to specifications or exceeded them. WB7 was slated to be the last research reactor per se, and if it succeeded the Navy committed to building a full scale power reactor. WB7 was built, some adjustments were necessary but in just over half a year adjustments were made and it operated at design specifications. At that point, the Navy took the whole project secret, a technology that could provide unlimited clean energy to mankind is now a Navy military secret.

Obama is familiar with this reactor and it's development, I was very suprised to read about it in his blog. I was familiar with it but I've been following the development of fusion over decades and I particularly like to follow the alternative approaches. To be sure, the Tokamak can produce electricity in huge quantities; but the physics of a Tokamak reactor are such that the larger it is scaled up, the more efficient it becomes, and commercial break-even can only be achieved with a very large reactor. Getting investors to invest in an unproven technology that can't be tested on a small scale is very difficult. At the present state of the art a full scale conventional Tokamak reactor would have to be about 4GW in size and cost around 25 billion or more to build and there are still unanswered material engineering issues that are bound to make the first reactors less reliable and more expensive to operate than desirable. Nobody knows for example, how various materials that are being proposed for the diverter, a component that extracts helium ash from the reacting plasma, will react to the heat loads, neutron, and ion bombardment that they will be subject to in a working power reactor. Research reactors neither reach the necessary power levels nor operate long enough to answer these questions.

By contrast a power producing Bussard Polywell reactor only costs about 25 million (that's with an 'm' instead of a 'b') to build, and can be built on a much smaller scale that represents a more acceptable risk for potential investors. Operating on aneutronic fuels makes it completely safe so it can comfortably be placed right in the middle of a city where the power is needed. Because all the reaction products, when operating on aneutronic fuels, are charged particles, electricity can be extracted directly using a reverse plasma dynamics device, with projected efficiencies of around 80%. With no moving parts for the actual generation, and much less waste heat to remove than with a thermal plant, the operational costs will be very low. The amount of power produced from a single gram of boron and hydrogen will for all intents and purposes mean the fuel is essentially free.

But it remains to be seen how well it will scale; we can't put all our eggs in one basket, or at least shouldn't, and he understand other alternatives; oil will continue to be a part of the mix as well other fossil fuels and nuclear fission. Really we're in a situation where we need to pursue every single option that we have with great vigor, otherwise we're going to collectively starve and our economy is going to totally collapse. Barock understands this and is intent on directing a large amount of resources to addressing the problem rapidly.

Modernizing our national electrical grid is something that we absolutely need to do. Currently, we lose around 17% of the energy we generate in our grid; and this is equivalent to all of the oil we import. We could reduce this loss to 1-2% and at the same time approximately double our grid capacity by converting all lines longer than 300km from AC transmission to high voltage DC transmission. Almost all of that loss is radiative and changing to DC eliminates that radiative loss. It also eliminates a phenomena known as skin effect where the intense magnetic fields force the current to the outside of the conductors essentially reducing the size of the conductors and increasing their resistance. So in addition to eliminating radiative losses, DC transmission, by eliminating the skin effect, greatly decreases resistive losses (usually referred to as "copper losses" even though copper is rarely if ever used in long distance transmission lines).

Doubling the capacity of the grid and largely eliminating the losses over longer distances would enable a much larger percentage of our power to be derived from wind and solar. Wind and solar power have are intermittent power sources, but geographical diversity can address the issue of availability of wind power. In Germany, which has a much smaller geographical footprint than the US, it has been found that about 1/3rd the peak capacity is continuously available because the wind blows here or there but it's always blowing somewhere. Here in the US, where we have much greater geographical diversity to tap; the ratio should be better. Solar is of coarse only available when the sun is shinning, but that is not a bad thing because it happens that is when electrical demand peaks.

So, we could save the energy equivalent of all the energy we import just by modernizing our grid; without adding any additional generating capacity. But because a DC line can be operated at 1.414 times the voltage of the RMS value of an AC line given
the same insulators, right there it increases the capacity by 141%. But there is more; long distance AC lines are limited in capacity by sag. As current increases, the wires expand, causing the distance over which power has to travel to increase, and
that causes a phase shift. Power arriving at the destination with the improper phase relationship results in current flow between generating sources that never goes through a load but only heats up the transmission lines further. But with DC transmission, the phase is maintained by the inverter at the terminating end, and so this current limit no longer applies and only mechanical issues become limiting factors and so typically capacity is increased by 200% or more.

Further; because phasing is no longer an issue, and frequency is determined electronically by inverting equipment and not by the mechanics of the source generator, the load / frequency relationship is eliminated and this prevents cascading failures from occurring as the result of sudden load or generation shifts.

By greatly improving the capacity and eliminating this load/frequency issue; the amount of power from variable sources such as wind and and solar, in terms of a percentage of the total power mix, can be greatly increased. This is good because wind power is the least expensive source of electricity, less expensive even than coal with today's technology.

If we eliminate the loss penalty associated with long distance transmission, and if we eliminate the cascading failure, then it makes sense to tie the Eastern and Western grids together allowing us to take advantage of time zones and the fact that peak electrical demand occurs at different times across the country. DC transmission also allows grids of differing frequency to be joined, so we could even consider doing things like tying the North American grid into South American or even Soviet grid across the bearing straits. Politically that seems impossible now but if we weren't all fighting over dwindling energy resources it might become politically possible and economically advantageous.

So seeing Barack speak of the Bussard Polywell reactor, seeing him state that modernizing the grid should be a high priority, makes me feel very good about his knowledge of the energy situation.

I'm not feeling ambiguous anymore. John McCain's voting record leaves little doubt that his presidency would just be more of the same. I don't feel this country can afford more of the same. The two most significant issues in my view are energy (war for energy) and energy (it's impact on our economy).

War has proven itself to be a very poor energy policy over the last six years. Aside from the countless lives lost and people mutilated and injured, many of them women and children, and the destruction of many historical artifacts in one of the most historically rich places in the world; the war has also resulted in reducing the oil production in Iraq to approximately half what it was before the war, and for many of those years to amounts much less than that.

If we had spent the money we spent in the very first year in Iraq on alternative energy instead; we could have displaced the energy equivalent of all of Iraq's oil production, before the war, indefinitely. We'd have many children still alive and unmutilated, and that alternative energy would never run out, unlike Iraq's oil. And of coarse we would have saved all the money spent in the five+ years after that.

Our economic woes are directly tied to energy woes. An expanding economy requires an expanding energy supply, and our compound interest based banking system demands an expanding economy just to stay afloat.

The news media will talk about housing bubbles and credit bubbles and house much of the economy was predicated on the value of houses just going up and up, but what they don't say is WHY the value didn't keep going up and up, and that is because money that would have otherwise gone into housing had to go into increasingly expensive energy.

As the cost of energy increased, money was vacuumed out of the economy. The feds responded by putting more money into the economy by lowering interest rates but this just drove up the cost of oil since it's availability is limited by factors that can't immediately be significantly affected by increased spending. In the long term, a sufficiently high cost of oil can increase production because there are sources that can be tapped, but various factors prevent that from happening in the near term.

John McCain's energy plan is completely inadequate both in terms of it's aggressiveness and scope. To be honest, I don't think Obama's plan is adequate either but it's an order of magnitude better in terms of scope and far more diverse.

World oil production has been approximately level over the last three years, yet demand from India and China has grown significantly. Increased consumption by these countries had to be offset by reductions elsewhere and so the price of oil rose until those reductions resulted, with devastating effects upon our economy and the economies of many other industrialized nations.

The increased cost of oil has resulted in increased exploration and discovery; and there have been a number of super-giant fields discovered in recent years. However, most of these new fields are either in deep water, are deep underground, or both. Many are in areas where the political situation is unstable making them difficult to tap, technical issues aside.

Although the oil giants continue to deny the presence of abiotic oil, many of these new fields are exactly that, oil trapped under granite or basaltic capstones originating in the Earth's mantle. In the case of several recent large fields this has been proven by the measurement of the isotopic ratios of carbon. The depth of these fields, and having to drill through rock, necessitate both special casings and tungsten or depleted uranium drill bits which are in short supply world-wide. The reason for this is that temperature rises with depth and at the depths these fields exist more conventional drill materials melt or loose their strength. Some of the recently discovered offshore fields are under more than a mile of water requiring advanced offshore drilling techniques.

These deep fields are desirable to tap because they contain light sweet crude, the type that is most desirable to refineries because the low sulfur content minimizes processing required to meet clean air requirements and US refineries and pipelines are largely designed for light crude. Heavy crude requires heated pipelines to transport in order to reduce the viscosity of the oil enough to be pumped and refineries have to be equipped with additional processing to handle heavy crude. A brief synopsis of the process of refining heavy crude is provided here.

Heavy crude is found in tar sands and oil shale formations and we have huge quantities, over 3.5 trillion barrels, but the difficulty of extracting oil from shale, the environmental costs of doing so, and the difficulty in transporting and refining it all make it economically less attractive. More energy is required for every step. The viscosity is so high that it either has to be mined, as is done in Canada, which is environmentally damaging, or heated in place (energy intensive) in order to reduce viscosity enough for it to flow, or lastly, a solvent can be used, which is both environmentally damaging and expensive.

Canada is using open pit mining to get at it which has proven to be reasonably efficient but an environmental nightmare since large stretches of forest covering the deposits has to be removed to get at it and it takes two tonnes of material to get a barrel of oil, and that material, the trailings, when returned, is contaminated with toxic substances resulting from the process or that existed previously but were not mobile. In addition, large quantities of natural gas are used in processing the tar-like bitumen recovered into lighter commercially usable products.

The United States also has huge coal reserves, and coal can be converted into gasoline, diesel, and other useful hydrocarbon products, but again, the process is energy intensive and much carbon dioxide is created by the conversion process adding to that which will be created when those fuels are burned. The options we have for producing more oil are expensive, environmentally damaging, and take time to implement.

Waste Not Want Not.

We do have some options that we can implement relatively rapidly. Today, we lose approximately 17% of the electrical energy that we generate in the long distance transmission portion of our electrical grid. Most of that energy is radiated away. That is to say, the long lines act as big antennas and simply radiate the energy away as a 60 Hz radio wave. This radiation increases the risk of leukemia and possibly some other cancers in humans exposed to these fields. Most of the remaining losses are referred to as "copper" losses (even though the lines are mostly aluminum with a steel core), basically electrical resistance in the lines causes some of the power to be dissipated as heat.

Converting lines to high voltage DC transmission eliminates radiative loss and reduces copper losses. The reduction in copper losses results from the elimination of what is known as skin effect. AC current in a conductor creates a magnetic field that induces an opposing current, forcing current towards the outer surface of the conductor. Because the entire cross-section of the conductor is not effectively used, this is like reducing the diameter of the conductors and increasing their resistance. This effect does not happen with DC current.

With DC transmission lines, there is some loss in the rectifier and inverters required at either end of the line, but these generally amount to less than 1% and for lines longer than 300km, the net loss is lower even when the loss of rectification and inversion are added to the line losses.

Converting all lines longer than 300km to DC transmission would reduce the average loss from around 17% to between 2-3%, and that savings in energy is equal to almost all of the oil we import. This one single step on the part of our country alone would reduce global oil consumption by almost 17% if we used the energy saved to replace imported oil. We can't do this instantly, but over time we could.

Presently, 25% of our electricity is generated by natural gas. If we took the energy saved from that natural gas generated portion, we could then either convert cars to run on natural gas or we can convert the natural gas to liquid fuels via the Fischer-Troppe process, both of which would require new infrastructure which is why it would take some time but it's something we can do. By doing this we'd wipe out the trade deficit and have a trade surplus and we'd eliminate the CO2 resulting from the combustion of all the oil we import.

In the meantime, while our economy is in the toilet, we could put a lot of the jobless back to work manufacturing and installing the components of this upgrade. This would be a lot better investment of tax money than the golden parachutes of wall street CEOs.

In addition to converting long distance lines to DC, tying the eastern and western electric grids together would allow us to take advantage of the fact that peaks occur at different times across the country because of the different time zones. This would not be practical with AC transmission because the losses would be too great across such distances and cascading failures would spread across the entire grid. DC transmission eliminates cascading failures because the frequency is determined by the inverters and not by load, and because the inverters can instantly adjust voltages as well. In addition, converting existing lines to DC would approximately double their capacity.

So doing this would eliminate the equivalent of all the oil we import; but wait; there's more! Coal fired plants and nuclear plants can't be throttled down at night because in the case of nuclear it takes too long to get the chain reaction back up, and in the case of coal, the thermal mass of the combustion bed makes rapid throttling impossible. As a consequence of this, there is enough wasted capacity on the grid at night, when the demand is approximately 30% of the day time peak but production is 75% of daytime peak, that we could power our entire commute with this wasted energy. By electrifying our vehicle fleet and charging overnight we could again eliminate the energy equivalent of almost all of the oil we import.

In short, between transmission losses and unused capacity at night, we waste more energy than all of the oil we import and all of the oil we produce domestically. 50% of the wasted electricity comes from coal, the most CO2 intensive fuel. We could save even more energy by electrifying our railroads and moving more of our freight transport from trucks to trains.

All of this energy we could save, the equivalent of all of the oil we import, all of the oil we produce domestically, and part of the natural gas and coal that we burn, with zero impact on our live style. There are many who feel that the only way that we can substantially reduce our energy use and carbon dioxide generation is by living a very minimalistic life style, eliminate the suburbs and stop eating meat. And while those things would certainly help us reduce consumption, and because the time it takes to create infrastructure makes it impossible to do these things instantly, we may be forced to make concessions in the short-term, but we have the means to reduce our energy consumption by probably two thirds without major sacrifices and this would greatly reduce the size of the problem of replacing the remainder of fossil fuels with clean renewable alternatives.

There is a doable way out of our current crises if we have the willingness to invest the necessary infrastructure improvements. I believe that Obama would be willing to make those investments and McCain would not. The longer we wait, the more painful the transition will be. I would rather not wait another four years.