The Galloping Beaver
Buried at the end of the article you linked to, at page two, is this: "Stiglitz, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and top economist at the World Bank, is widely considered to be a liberal. In his writings, he has criticized globalization and has called for stronger government intervention to moderate market forces. He also has criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy."
Hmm. No mention in your post that the economist who came up with the $2 trillion figure is a Bush-loathing, anti-Iraq War liberal who worked for Bill Clinton. Seems to me an important fact you’d want to bring out, don’t you think?
Richard. You seem to be insinuating that someone was trying to hide that fact. Since the post linked to that entire article, nothing was hidden and you are doing nothing but creating a strawman.
The post neither defends nor criticizes the estimates of a Nobel Prize winning economist, supported by a Harvard Business School professor. It simply highlights an article in a traditional media outlet then engages a subject on the corollary - "what consitutes a trillion dollars?"
Your comment is therefore nonsequiter. Not that you haven't been there before.
So the point of the post is that a trillion dollars is a lot of money. Ah, okay. Got it.
Hey, I bet that amount could pay off some law student loans for deserving attorney bloggers!
A trillion dollars is enough to build sixty-five hundred 100 megawatt Boeing Solar Power Tower electricity and hydrogen generating power plants.
These plants would generate the energy equivalent of over a billion barrels of oil a year, or 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. This is significantly more than we would ever hope to import from Iraq. In fact it's more than twice as much as we import from our number one Oil Import partner -- Canada.
And for those of you who will immediately jump in and say, "that's great but you can't turn electricity into gasoline", I say, "poppycock, nonsense!".
Hitler's Third Reich were turning coal into high-grade diesel and petrol seventy years ago. It's very elementary chemistry, diesel and petrol are very simple carbon and hydrogen molecules. The power tower plant is used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen and then the heat from the steam portion of the plant is used to reform the hydrogen and coke (carbon, coal, etc.) into petrol, deisel, propane, jet fuel, whatever you want.
In fact, a single solar plant such as this can produce electricity, hydrocarbon fuels (petrol, diesel kerosene), chemical by-products, and purified (distilled) drinking water.
Regards,
Andrew
Links and notes for previous post:
Montana Governor wants to convert coal into gasoline:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
co...852_joel18.html
The key point is this 80 year old straight forward
process is capable of converting methane into gasoline
(or diesel or kerosene, etc). So _any_ method of
generating methane (e.g, blue-green algae, compost
heap, town gas, etc) can then be reformed into high
grade gasoline using the Fischer-Tropsch method.
I have not found a page that describes converting
bio-diesel directly into gasoline, however it is
definately doable using a combination of TDP (changing
world tech, see below) and F-T process.
Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act - April, 1944
What happened?
http://www.fe.doe.gov/aboutus/
hi...ls_history.html
As oil prices continue to escalate, other alternatives
to producing oil have been gaining importance. The
most viable of these is the coal to oil process, known
as the Fischer-Tropsch process, that aims to convert
coal into crude oil. It was a concept pioneered in
Nazi Germany when imports of petroleum were restricted
due to war and Germany found a method to extract oil
from coal. It was known as Ersatz ("substitute" in
German), and accounted for nearly half the total oil
used in WWII by Germany. However, the process was used
only as a last resort as naturally occurring oil was
much cheaper. As crude oil prices increase, the cost
of coal to oil conversion becomes comparatively
cheaper.
The method involves converting high ash coal into
synthetic oil in a multistage process. Ideally, a ton
of coal produces nearly 200 liters of crude, with
by-products ranging from tar to rare chemicals.
Fischer-Tropsch Method from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum
(most articles talk about coal/gas to diesel, but the
Germans did coal to gasoline)
Currently, two companies have commercialised their
Fischer-Tropsch technology. Shell in Bintulu,
Malaysia, uses natural gas as a feedstock, and
produces primarily low-sulfur diesel fuels. Sasol in
South Africa uses coal as a feedstock, and produces a
variety of synthetic petroleum products. The process
is today used in South Africa to produce most of the
country's diesel fuel from coal by the company Sasol.
The process was used in South Africa to meet its
energy needs during its isolation under Apartheid.
This process has received renewed attention in the
quest to produce low sulfur diesel fuel in order to
minimize the environmental impact from the use of
diesel engines.
Methane Hydrates off the coast of the Carolinas (and
Texas, California, Alaska, etc).
1300 trillion cubic feet -- equivalent to 40 trillion
barrels of oil, just sitting there... the Japanese
have recently begun mining their methane hydrates,
then reform it into diesel/gasoline.
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-shee...ates/
title.html
The Boeing Solar Power Tower which has been
"disappeared"
more links (truncated from previous post)
The Boeing Solar Power Tower which has been
"disappeared" from Boeing's site:
http://www.boeing.com/
assocprodu...powertower.html
can be found at the Internet archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/
20041...powertower.html
Paid for by US tax payers, first commercial one is
being built in Spain.
Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada (Canadian Oil Sands)
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=fo...52769&t=h&
hl=en
Now zoom out until it's at the 50 mile scale. Take a
close look. You are now looking at land that contains
more oil than Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait
combined.
Seawolf Class Submarine
50 megawatts, never has to be refueled for the life of
the boat.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/s...ship/ssn-
21.htm
President Bush Discusses Biodiesel and Alternative
Fuel Sources
Virginia BioDiesel Refinery
West Point, Virginia
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/r...5/
20050516.html
The Solar Constant is 1300 watts/sq-m or 2.0E+17 watts
over the entire surface of the Earth. That is the
equivalent of one _trillion_ barrels of oil each and
every day. We only need to capture 0.01% of that to
power all of human civilization.
http://www.solarserver.de/lexiko...onstante-
e.html
Changing World Technologies
Convert anything into oil and gas (it's just carbon
and hydrogen...)
http://www.discover.com/issues/j...thing-into-oil/
http://www.changingworldtech.com/
Oil Reserves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil...ki/
Oil_reserves
CIA Fact book -- oil exporting countries
Pick a country:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publicati...ok/geos/
ca.html
scroll down to "Economy", then "Oil - production",
then click on the little chart icon. Now, look down
the list, who's our friend? Who's not our friend? Who
do we control?
By rank order:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publicati...r/
2176rank.html
The point of all of this?
There is _no_ energy crisis. Never has been, never will be. There is only a crisis of ignorance. The complete lack of morals, ethics and
long term thinking by those in power is the real "power" crisis.
Is this anything new or original? Nope. Buckminster Fuller said it fourty years ago:
http://www.geni.org/energy/
libra..._ignorance.html
We all learned in highschool that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Not only is it not destroyed but we get another trillion barrels of
oil equivalent of it for _free_ every day. That's US$63 trillion dollars _a day_ (at today's spot price) raining down on you and me for free
every day. $10,000 for every man, woman and child on the planet, every day. Not to mention the 100 trillion watts of geothermal energy
from the earth that is largely untapped. So why are you paying for it? Why are we killing people for it?
Every thinking citizen of the world needs to read this book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product...7846&s=books&
v=
glance
And while you're reading it, keep telling yourself, "it's the 21st century, we don't need oil at all, it's the biggest red-herring in history". And
by the way, so is the so called "hydrogen economy", it's a huge pork barrel, boondoggle distraction. The real answer is to liquify methane
from any source (coal, soy, blue-green algae, methane hydrates) into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Use solar and other alternative energy
for the conversion process and then none of the existing infrastructure needs to change.
You can even suck green house gasses out of the atmosphere (CO2 and H20) and convert them back into hydrocarbons using a solar
power plant. Have your cake and eat it too -- gasoline with zero net carbon.
Cheers!
The point of all of this?
There is _no_ energy crisis. Never has been, never will be. There is only a crisis of ignorance. The complete lack of morals, ethics and long term thinking by those in power is the real "power" crisis.
Is this anything new or original? Nope. Buckminster Fuller said it fourty years ago: http://www.geni.org/energy/
libra..._ignorance.html
We all learned in highschool that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Not only is it not destroyed but we get another trillion barrels of oil equivalent of it for _free_ every day. That's US$63 trillion dollars _a day_ (at today's spot price) raining down on you and me for free every day. $10,000 for every man, woman and child on the planet, every day. Not to mention the 100 trillion watts of geothermal energy
from the earth that is largely untapped. So why are you paying for it? Why are we killing people for it?
Every thinking citizen of the world needs to read this book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product...=books&
v=glance
And while you're reading it, keep telling yourself, "it's the 21st century, we don't need oil at all, it's the biggest red-herring in history". And by the way, so is the so called "hydrogen economy", it's a huge pork barrel, boondoggle distraction. The real answer is to liquify methane from any source (coal, soy, ag-waste, blue-green algae, methane hydrates) into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Use solar and other alternative energy for the conversion process and then none of the existing infrastructure needs to change.
You can even suck green house gasses out of the atmosphere (CO2 and H20) and convert them back into hydrocarbons using a solar power plant. Have your cake and eat it too -- gasoline with zero net carbon.
Cheers!
The entire combined populations of Milwaukee, Atlanta, Boston, New Orleans, and Seattle, working at minimum wage for their entire lifetimes, would earn about $1 trillion before taxes.
The GDP of South America.
If the land surface of the earth were divided into pieces 36 feet square, there would be about a trillion such pieces.
A computer operating at 1MHz asked to perform a command requiring a trillion operations would take 31 1/2 years to complete the command.
... I think you mean 40/hrs/WEEK not day ...
Thats a lot of money
Well, 3 years after this was posted and only $800 billion spent to date on this war. What is worse? Our congress in a matter of weeks managed to spend nearly as much ($787 billion), and have plans of spending more than 4 times that outside of normal fiscal spending this year alone! And to think, we were worried about the cost of the Iraq war! What silly people we were.....
Well, 3 years after this was posted and only $800 billion spent to date on this war. What is worse? Our congress in a matter of weeks managed to spend nearly as much ($787 billion), and have plans of spending more than 4 times that outside of normal fiscal spending this year alone! And to think, we were worried about the cost of the Iraq war! What silly people we were.....
You forgot about the interest. Easily over 1 trillion dollars. Plus 600+ billion more on nationalizing health care + interest of course. I predict in the end 4 billion more... any takers?!
I meant 4 trillion... whoops. It's late.
Beers!!!
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