The Economy - It Ain't All Bad
This really isn't a dream and it's only a vision in terms of a possibility that I see, nothing I've seen in some sort of mystical vision, just something I see is a potential knowing where we are at in terms of resources and technology. We could go here if we can overcome the human drive to kill each other and generally act stupidly.
Our economy has been seriously damaged seven years of military adventurism. Halliburton has been allowed to raid the national treasury then exit stage right to the Dubai, UAE.
We keep hearing about peak oil, the housing market bubble bursting, the declining value of the dollar, bank failures, but there are some positives that we don't hear much about, and even some silver linings to the clouds we do hear about.
I believe we are in for some tough times but that our economy, the world wide economy, actually is poised for golden times, if, and only if, we can cut-off the military industrial complex; or perhaps more properly, the military industrial banking government complex. We have to stop war.
Now, why in the face of all of this would I make a statement like this? Let's look at some of the causes and effects. The value of the dollar; in an economic system you have a certain amount of production of goods and services, you have a certain amount of money circulating. If the amount of goods and services decreases relative to the amount of money circulating, that money becomes worth less because it represents less goods and services per monetary unit.
The production of goods and services is dependent upon labor, energy, and raw materials. We spent 3.5 trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, that's money that went into circulation with zero corresponding goods and services being produced. We sent people and goods and services to Iraq, reducing the existing pool of goods and services and reducing the labor to produce them.
Before we invaded Iraq, oil production was 2.5 million barrels per day. It decreased to almost zero immediately after invasion but has slowly rebounded to a current production of around 1.5 million barrels per day. In addition, the prosecution of the war has wasted tremendous amounts of energy, so in addition to cutting production by 1 million barrels per day (more than that early on), we're also wasting tremendous amounts of energy.
So we've taken away from energy and labor available to produce goods and services while at the same time we've dumped trillions into the economy; inflation is the inevitable result of this. This isn't entirely bad however, and here is why.
The high cost of oil, over $100/barrel, has spurred the development of alternative energy sources. In a decade or so we've gone from obtaining less than 1% of our energy in the United States, to over 3% from renewables, and the growth rate of both solar and wind installations has been going upwards on a logarithmic curve and that's energy that will never run out. It's also energy that has proven to be cheap; wind is now below the cost of coal which previously was the least expensive source of electricity.
Over the years our manufacturing sector has suffered to a large degree because foreign countries have artificially kept the value of their currency low. In other words; we see a falling dollar here now and panic; but China has intentionally kept the value of the Yuan low; it made their products cheap to foreign markets strengthening their manufacturing sector. The dollar has been the currency of international trade for many years, and that has artificially strengthened it, which further put us at a disadvantage when it comes to selling our products on the world market.
The high value of the dollar made foreign labor cheap; first our manufacturing sector, and then much of our service industries outsourced labor requirements to foreign countries to lower their operating costs. If you're a customer of a major telephone company, cable company, bank, ISP, etc, you've probably experienced the joys of talking to a representative with a thick Indian accent reading scripts. The low value of the dollar has forced some of these companies to re-think outsourcing as that foreign labor becomes more expensive.
We have been importing a large percentage of our energy needs when we have all the resources we need to be a net energy exporter right here at home. The reason we import most of our oil is not because we've used up half of our domestic resources as suggested by the Hubert peak theory; it's because oil here costs $10-$14 to pump out of small fields here; and you can poke a hole in the ground and it squirts out in the middle east.
The oil that we tapped here first was sweet light crude. For those not familiar with the terminology, sweet crude oil is crude oil with low sulfur content. Light crude is crude oil with a high percentage of lighter components, low viscosity, small molecular size hydrocarbons.
The majority of natural crude that is near the surface is not of the sweet light variety because being close to the surface, the lighter elements were able to evaporate leaving only the heavier more viscous components. Oil near the surface has passed through more of the crust and picked up more sulfur.
But sweet light crude is the easiest to deal with because it already contains a mix of the most commercially valuable molecules, those that become gasoline and diesel oil, and without the need to remove sulfur which otherwise causes pollution, sulfur oxides mix with water vapor in the atmosphere to create sulfurous and sulfuric acid which rains out in acid rain, destroying everything from buildings to aquatic life.
So the refineries built int he United States were built to deal with sweet light crude, they lack the cracking and reforming capacity to break larger molecules into more useful sized molecules, and they lack the necessary capacity for the removal of sulfur.
A weak dollar means it takes a lot of dollars to buy a barrel of foreign oil, that's why oil is now over $100 per barrel. This makes production of domestic oil resources look a lot more attractive. The problem is that oil companies aren't going to be willing to invest in the necessary refinery capabilities unless they can be reasonably sure that the price is going to remain high. But if it does and they become convinced, then we'll see domestic resources developed.
We have as much heavy sour crude in Southern California as the entire country of Venezuela. So why then is Venezuela able to sell Citgo gasoline at competitive rates here in the United States? They have the refinery capacity to deal with the huge heavy sour crude reserves they possess.
So the low value of the dollar is increasing the cost of imports, encouraging the production and consumption of domestic goods and services while discouraging the consumption of imported goods and services. The lower value of the dollar is making our goods and services more economically attractive to foreign consumers increasing exports. Both factors create jobs here at home.
The Fed keeps lowering interest rates; but I think what we really need to do is to encourage changes that increase our efficiency; that increase the amount of goods and services we can produce and reduce the energy we consume that comes from non-renewable sources or at least sources which aren't sustainable over the long term.
Most of our electricity is generated by Coal and Nuclear, and that capacity can't be readily throttled. The thermal mass of a combustion bed on a coal fired plant, and the time it takes to bring a nuclear chain reaction back up make it impractical to throttle these types of plants up and down every night and the result is a lot of wasted capacity. Enough capacity in fact to replace ALL of the oil used for our daily commute. About 58% of the oil we consume is used for this commute. We import about 66% of the oil consumed, so if we could simply use this wasted energy for our commute, we could eliminate about 85% of our oil imports!
So how can we do this? A massive switch to plug-in hybrids and all electric vehicles could make this possible. These new cars will need to be manufactured, that means jobs.
Other things we can do, we can take electricity during times of surplus production and make butynol, a 4-carbon alcohol that can be burned in unmodified gasoline engines, which can then be used to replace gasoline. There are several methods of doing this; one is to use a kind of reverse fuel cell device that takes water, carbon dioxide, and electricity to create butynol; the carbon dioxide can come from coal plants that are presently just releasing in into the atmosphere. Granted; it will still be released when the butynol is burned, but, this will be carbon dioxide released instead of that which would have been released by gasoline burning instead of in addition to it as is currently the case, so we'd be cutting the net amount of carbon dioxide produced by that produced by the entire daily commute, this would be huge. I mentioned there were several methods; carbon dioxide can also be electrolyzed, like water and separated into carbon-monoxide and oxygen. The carbon-monoxide can then be added to steam (forming what is known as process gas) and in the presence of catalytic reformers made into many different hydrocarbon products, including butynol.
After coal, and nuclear, the next largest source of electricity is natural gas. Natural gas plants, unlike coal and nuclear, are throttled down at night so they don't just produce energy that is wasted. However; the peak electrical load on the grid occurs during the daytime when solar irradiance is also at a peak. New solar thermal technology using inexpensive plastic Fresnel lenses instead of expensive parabolic mirrors to concentrate solar energy make solar power economically competitive. If these plants replaced electricity currently being produced by natural gas, that natural gas could be converted to liquid fuels via the Fischer-Troppe process and replace oil distillates powering our commute. Diesel-like fuels are actually easiest to produce this way so this might be a way to replace oil used for non-commute purposes such as trucking and home heating.
North America is the only continent in the world where the railroad lines haven't been electrified to a large degree. This is something we should do because it would allow our trains to be powered by whatever energy source is the least expensive at the time. Right now it's diesel or stand-still. With our trucks powered by diesel, our trains powered by diesel, and our planes powered by diesel; if we don't have diesel we all starve, and it's not a clean energy source. Burning diesel produces carcinogenic soot in addition to carbon dioxide.
We need to invest more heavily in new technology, not only to meet our own energy needs but also to develop products for export. A new type of fusion reactor called a Bussard Polywell fusion reactor is looking very promising. It might be contributing to our energy needs in just a few years or, some unsolvable problem might prevent it from doing so. So there is this hope, but the egg isn't hatched yet; however, it's looking really promising. Nuclear energy is really what we need long term; and fusion is preferable, it's cleaner and safer than fission. But fission can be made much cleaner and safer and more efficient than it presently is and if properly developed can positively contribute towards our energy needs.
If the Bussard reactor doesn't fly; there are many other approaches to fusion that might. The main pursuit in the fusion realm right now is Tokamak based fusion. This is fusion based upon the magnetic confinement of extremely hot and unstable plasma. We are now at a point where we know, at a large enough scale this is absolutely doable, but the economics of doing so are really poor because the capital investment required to build one of these machines is huge. Now presently that's because many components need to be custom designed, engineered, and fabricated, and even the machining tools necessary to fabricate the parts need to be custom made; so if a design is proven, then in time the costs will come down, but still it's going to not be nearly as cheap as other potential candidates, particularly the Bussard reactor, it's always going to be too large and heavy for many applications. You're never going to see a Tokamak based Mr. Fusion in your DeLorean. You won't even see a Bussard reactor based DeLorean, although a Bussard reactor might well power large trucks, trains, aircraft, spacecraft, and be the basis for the energy necessary to terraform new worlds and make them habitable.
We should be pursuing each of these potentially viable fusion capabilities as well as generation IV fast-flux fission reactor technology at the highest level practical. The payoffs are just too large not go make the absolute best effort we can; and yet, the amount of money we are devoting to this research is almost zero. The biggest fusion project, our contribution to ITER, only amounts to what we spend on two days of oil imports over a 25 year period. For something that could radically improve the human condition across the entire planet as well as greatly reduce environment damage, pursuing this at such as low rate is a crime.
But it's also a crime that we're dumping the lions share of our tiny fusion research budget into what is the least economically viable fusion possibility. It is scientifically viable, but we need something scientifically AND economically viable. The Bussard reactor I feel is presently the best candidate; but there are also other derivatives of the Farnsworth Fusor that deserve research, there are Z-pinch schemes worthy of research, there are levitated dipole schemes, and there are other exotic methods such as sonic bubble fusion, cold fusion (and this IS a real phenomena even though it's been poorly reproduced BUT it's probably not ever going to scale to commercial power production levels, but it MIGHT be a viable Mr. Fusion for your DeLorean).
Our economy is salvageable; we have to first stop wasting money on war. Then we need to solve our energy problem and that is completely 100% doable and we have to do it in a way that is extremely rapid; that will put a lot of people back to work. If we do it with sufficient robustness and efficiency; we can become a net energy producer.
On the subject of home heating; those giant cooling towers you see next to nuclear reactors? Those should be replaced with pipes going to heating homes and offices and providing process heat for industry. They do it in Sweden, and if a country that produced the Kia can do it, then we sure can.
So do we choose to have our economy tank? Or do we choose to return this country to greatness? One that is self-sufficient and one that respects the sovereignty of foreign nations, places a value on life, human and otherwise, and can sustain that greatness?
Do you know what we have the potential to do? There are 10,000 to 20,000 minor planets in the Oort cloud, these are planets in deep freeze, turning them into habitable real estate involves primarily the input of energy. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and it is vastly abundant in our own solar system, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus being made primarily of the stuff. That could provide the energy needed to light up, warm up, and make habitable these minor worlds for trillions of years. These things are available to us if we simply choose not to destroy ourselves and our existing habitat and pursue our human potential.
Our economy has been seriously damaged seven years of military adventurism. Halliburton has been allowed to raid the national treasury then exit stage right to the Dubai, UAE.
We keep hearing about peak oil, the housing market bubble bursting, the declining value of the dollar, bank failures, but there are some positives that we don't hear much about, and even some silver linings to the clouds we do hear about.
I believe we are in for some tough times but that our economy, the world wide economy, actually is poised for golden times, if, and only if, we can cut-off the military industrial complex; or perhaps more properly, the military industrial banking government complex. We have to stop war.
Now, why in the face of all of this would I make a statement like this? Let's look at some of the causes and effects. The value of the dollar; in an economic system you have a certain amount of production of goods and services, you have a certain amount of money circulating. If the amount of goods and services decreases relative to the amount of money circulating, that money becomes worth less because it represents less goods and services per monetary unit.
The production of goods and services is dependent upon labor, energy, and raw materials. We spent 3.5 trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, that's money that went into circulation with zero corresponding goods and services being produced. We sent people and goods and services to Iraq, reducing the existing pool of goods and services and reducing the labor to produce them.
Before we invaded Iraq, oil production was 2.5 million barrels per day. It decreased to almost zero immediately after invasion but has slowly rebounded to a current production of around 1.5 million barrels per day. In addition, the prosecution of the war has wasted tremendous amounts of energy, so in addition to cutting production by 1 million barrels per day (more than that early on), we're also wasting tremendous amounts of energy.
So we've taken away from energy and labor available to produce goods and services while at the same time we've dumped trillions into the economy; inflation is the inevitable result of this. This isn't entirely bad however, and here is why.
The high cost of oil, over $100/barrel, has spurred the development of alternative energy sources. In a decade or so we've gone from obtaining less than 1% of our energy in the United States, to over 3% from renewables, and the growth rate of both solar and wind installations has been going upwards on a logarithmic curve and that's energy that will never run out. It's also energy that has proven to be cheap; wind is now below the cost of coal which previously was the least expensive source of electricity.
Over the years our manufacturing sector has suffered to a large degree because foreign countries have artificially kept the value of their currency low. In other words; we see a falling dollar here now and panic; but China has intentionally kept the value of the Yuan low; it made their products cheap to foreign markets strengthening their manufacturing sector. The dollar has been the currency of international trade for many years, and that has artificially strengthened it, which further put us at a disadvantage when it comes to selling our products on the world market.
The high value of the dollar made foreign labor cheap; first our manufacturing sector, and then much of our service industries outsourced labor requirements to foreign countries to lower their operating costs. If you're a customer of a major telephone company, cable company, bank, ISP, etc, you've probably experienced the joys of talking to a representative with a thick Indian accent reading scripts. The low value of the dollar has forced some of these companies to re-think outsourcing as that foreign labor becomes more expensive.
We have been importing a large percentage of our energy needs when we have all the resources we need to be a net energy exporter right here at home. The reason we import most of our oil is not because we've used up half of our domestic resources as suggested by the Hubert peak theory; it's because oil here costs $10-$14 to pump out of small fields here; and you can poke a hole in the ground and it squirts out in the middle east.
The oil that we tapped here first was sweet light crude. For those not familiar with the terminology, sweet crude oil is crude oil with low sulfur content. Light crude is crude oil with a high percentage of lighter components, low viscosity, small molecular size hydrocarbons.
The majority of natural crude that is near the surface is not of the sweet light variety because being close to the surface, the lighter elements were able to evaporate leaving only the heavier more viscous components. Oil near the surface has passed through more of the crust and picked up more sulfur.
But sweet light crude is the easiest to deal with because it already contains a mix of the most commercially valuable molecules, those that become gasoline and diesel oil, and without the need to remove sulfur which otherwise causes pollution, sulfur oxides mix with water vapor in the atmosphere to create sulfurous and sulfuric acid which rains out in acid rain, destroying everything from buildings to aquatic life.
So the refineries built int he United States were built to deal with sweet light crude, they lack the cracking and reforming capacity to break larger molecules into more useful sized molecules, and they lack the necessary capacity for the removal of sulfur.
A weak dollar means it takes a lot of dollars to buy a barrel of foreign oil, that's why oil is now over $100 per barrel. This makes production of domestic oil resources look a lot more attractive. The problem is that oil companies aren't going to be willing to invest in the necessary refinery capabilities unless they can be reasonably sure that the price is going to remain high. But if it does and they become convinced, then we'll see domestic resources developed.
We have as much heavy sour crude in Southern California as the entire country of Venezuela. So why then is Venezuela able to sell Citgo gasoline at competitive rates here in the United States? They have the refinery capacity to deal with the huge heavy sour crude reserves they possess.
So the low value of the dollar is increasing the cost of imports, encouraging the production and consumption of domestic goods and services while discouraging the consumption of imported goods and services. The lower value of the dollar is making our goods and services more economically attractive to foreign consumers increasing exports. Both factors create jobs here at home.
The Fed keeps lowering interest rates; but I think what we really need to do is to encourage changes that increase our efficiency; that increase the amount of goods and services we can produce and reduce the energy we consume that comes from non-renewable sources or at least sources which aren't sustainable over the long term.
Most of our electricity is generated by Coal and Nuclear, and that capacity can't be readily throttled. The thermal mass of a combustion bed on a coal fired plant, and the time it takes to bring a nuclear chain reaction back up make it impractical to throttle these types of plants up and down every night and the result is a lot of wasted capacity. Enough capacity in fact to replace ALL of the oil used for our daily commute. About 58% of the oil we consume is used for this commute. We import about 66% of the oil consumed, so if we could simply use this wasted energy for our commute, we could eliminate about 85% of our oil imports!
So how can we do this? A massive switch to plug-in hybrids and all electric vehicles could make this possible. These new cars will need to be manufactured, that means jobs.
Other things we can do, we can take electricity during times of surplus production and make butynol, a 4-carbon alcohol that can be burned in unmodified gasoline engines, which can then be used to replace gasoline. There are several methods of doing this; one is to use a kind of reverse fuel cell device that takes water, carbon dioxide, and electricity to create butynol; the carbon dioxide can come from coal plants that are presently just releasing in into the atmosphere. Granted; it will still be released when the butynol is burned, but, this will be carbon dioxide released instead of that which would have been released by gasoline burning instead of in addition to it as is currently the case, so we'd be cutting the net amount of carbon dioxide produced by that produced by the entire daily commute, this would be huge. I mentioned there were several methods; carbon dioxide can also be electrolyzed, like water and separated into carbon-monoxide and oxygen. The carbon-monoxide can then be added to steam (forming what is known as process gas) and in the presence of catalytic reformers made into many different hydrocarbon products, including butynol.
After coal, and nuclear, the next largest source of electricity is natural gas. Natural gas plants, unlike coal and nuclear, are throttled down at night so they don't just produce energy that is wasted. However; the peak electrical load on the grid occurs during the daytime when solar irradiance is also at a peak. New solar thermal technology using inexpensive plastic Fresnel lenses instead of expensive parabolic mirrors to concentrate solar energy make solar power economically competitive. If these plants replaced electricity currently being produced by natural gas, that natural gas could be converted to liquid fuels via the Fischer-Troppe process and replace oil distillates powering our commute. Diesel-like fuels are actually easiest to produce this way so this might be a way to replace oil used for non-commute purposes such as trucking and home heating.
North America is the only continent in the world where the railroad lines haven't been electrified to a large degree. This is something we should do because it would allow our trains to be powered by whatever energy source is the least expensive at the time. Right now it's diesel or stand-still. With our trucks powered by diesel, our trains powered by diesel, and our planes powered by diesel; if we don't have diesel we all starve, and it's not a clean energy source. Burning diesel produces carcinogenic soot in addition to carbon dioxide.
We need to invest more heavily in new technology, not only to meet our own energy needs but also to develop products for export. A new type of fusion reactor called a Bussard Polywell fusion reactor is looking very promising. It might be contributing to our energy needs in just a few years or, some unsolvable problem might prevent it from doing so. So there is this hope, but the egg isn't hatched yet; however, it's looking really promising. Nuclear energy is really what we need long term; and fusion is preferable, it's cleaner and safer than fission. But fission can be made much cleaner and safer and more efficient than it presently is and if properly developed can positively contribute towards our energy needs.
If the Bussard reactor doesn't fly; there are many other approaches to fusion that might. The main pursuit in the fusion realm right now is Tokamak based fusion. This is fusion based upon the magnetic confinement of extremely hot and unstable plasma. We are now at a point where we know, at a large enough scale this is absolutely doable, but the economics of doing so are really poor because the capital investment required to build one of these machines is huge. Now presently that's because many components need to be custom designed, engineered, and fabricated, and even the machining tools necessary to fabricate the parts need to be custom made; so if a design is proven, then in time the costs will come down, but still it's going to not be nearly as cheap as other potential candidates, particularly the Bussard reactor, it's always going to be too large and heavy for many applications. You're never going to see a Tokamak based Mr. Fusion in your DeLorean. You won't even see a Bussard reactor based DeLorean, although a Bussard reactor might well power large trucks, trains, aircraft, spacecraft, and be the basis for the energy necessary to terraform new worlds and make them habitable.
We should be pursuing each of these potentially viable fusion capabilities as well as generation IV fast-flux fission reactor technology at the highest level practical. The payoffs are just too large not go make the absolute best effort we can; and yet, the amount of money we are devoting to this research is almost zero. The biggest fusion project, our contribution to ITER, only amounts to what we spend on two days of oil imports over a 25 year period. For something that could radically improve the human condition across the entire planet as well as greatly reduce environment damage, pursuing this at such as low rate is a crime.
But it's also a crime that we're dumping the lions share of our tiny fusion research budget into what is the least economically viable fusion possibility. It is scientifically viable, but we need something scientifically AND economically viable. The Bussard reactor I feel is presently the best candidate; but there are also other derivatives of the Farnsworth Fusor that deserve research, there are Z-pinch schemes worthy of research, there are levitated dipole schemes, and there are other exotic methods such as sonic bubble fusion, cold fusion (and this IS a real phenomena even though it's been poorly reproduced BUT it's probably not ever going to scale to commercial power production levels, but it MIGHT be a viable Mr. Fusion for your DeLorean).
Our economy is salvageable; we have to first stop wasting money on war. Then we need to solve our energy problem and that is completely 100% doable and we have to do it in a way that is extremely rapid; that will put a lot of people back to work. If we do it with sufficient robustness and efficiency; we can become a net energy producer.
On the subject of home heating; those giant cooling towers you see next to nuclear reactors? Those should be replaced with pipes going to heating homes and offices and providing process heat for industry. They do it in Sweden, and if a country that produced the Kia can do it, then we sure can.
So do we choose to have our economy tank? Or do we choose to return this country to greatness? One that is self-sufficient and one that respects the sovereignty of foreign nations, places a value on life, human and otherwise, and can sustain that greatness?
Do you know what we have the potential to do? There are 10,000 to 20,000 minor planets in the Oort cloud, these are planets in deep freeze, turning them into habitable real estate involves primarily the input of energy. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and it is vastly abundant in our own solar system, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, and Uranus being made primarily of the stuff. That could provide the energy needed to light up, warm up, and make habitable these minor worlds for trillions of years. These things are available to us if we simply choose not to destroy ourselves and our existing habitat and pursue our human potential.
posted by Nanook at 11:04 PM
2 comments
