The Simple Truth I keep hearing about inflation and how it only went up about 3 percent. This is so absurd it is as they say beyond the pale. I went into a restaurant the other day and noticed some of the menu items went way up in price since the last time I was there two years ago. A panini, is a small Italian sandwich which is grilled. It was $5.00 and now is $9.00. The items on the menu all went up by the same percentage. The other day I went to Wendy’s, the hamburger fast food joint. I ordered a chicken sandwich and could believe it went up to almost $8.00. These pale in comparison to the amount my oil heating bill went up to. It was $170 per month on the plan and now it went to $343. I am not implying I pay more than anyone else, I am just saying I don’t see how these increases can continue. I have raised my family and they are supporting themselves. I feel very sorry for those people who are raising young ones and are facing incredible costs which just keep rising. We are being told things are great, they may be for someone, but for most of us they just keep getting worse. I know there are a lot of people worried by climate warming and they want us to completely change the way we live, but even if we did it would do no good because the most populated countries in the world are pumping out more carbon than ever. I saw something the other day which stated even with all we have done so far to generate clean energy, it has made no difference and the amount of carbon emissions, and worldwide, they have gone up. There is one thing about this country no one talks about. That is our fossil fuels are the cleanest of the fossil fuels, so stopping a lot of the production means more dirty fuel will be pumped by the other countries and we are really making things worse by not supplying our natural gas for example to the world. When you take certain actions you have to plan for what the results will be. In this case dirtier energy is replacing cleaner energy. When we talk about replacing gasoline powered cars with electric ones we never mention the fact we are making the gasoline engines cleaner all the time. First of all, electric cars are thousands of dollars more expensive than gasoline powered ones. The electric car being produced pollutes far more than producing a gas powered car so for about the first three years the gas car is more efficient in carbon emissions. As gasoline engines get better they will be even more efficient. The tires on electric cars are bigger and as they meet the road they produce more pollutants than the tires on electric cars. Since electric cars are much heavier, they put more strain on our bridges and roadways. Finally, when their batteries are finished they are terrible polluters and the battery replacement package is so expensive you might as well buy a new car. That makes the electric vehicle a one battery pack use vehicle which most likely will be discarded when the battery pack is finished. One of the things we have to really look into if we want to make things like energy cleaner is beaming down energy from space. We are just starting to get into this now. The first thing we have to do is study this and make sure it will not be harmful to humans. Using windmills to generate electricity is using an idea from the middle ages. The windmills are harmful to the environment and kill birds, use oil as lubricant, a lot of oil and the blades which are huge, are harmful to the environment when they are disposed of. Much of what is being called green energy generation is not. Solar panels do not last forever and they are dangerous to the environment when disposed of because of the materials they use. Nothing I have said is a secret and yet it all seems to be ignored in the rush to produce green energy which really isn’t. People are suffering for no reason when you really examine things. One area which is both efficient and less costly is hydro power. That is power from falling water. It is generated by dams which use this principle to turn generators. One of the first things we should have done was to find out how many more hydro generating stations we could build. As I said, this is both green and cheaper. Today we use hydro power to generate about 32% of all our renewable energy. It is only generating about 6% of our total energy needs however. California does not consider hydro power as renewable energy. It seems they are however getting 10 to 15% of their power from it. Yet they consider electric cars to replace gasoline ones. The world is being turned upside down. I understand the worry about climate change, but we have to make sure what we are doing is really helping and not making things worse. It is being said the average age of the automobile has just reached 12.5 years old in America. Would an electric car’s batteries reach that point without becoming useless? It could be a lot less or more. It depends on milage and how hot the climate is where you use the car. Heat is not good for batteries. Electric cars would not be good as taxis because they would have a life span less than 3 years because of the milage and it could be a lot less. This is based on the best scenario and the limit of about 200,000 miles, while the average life expectancy of a gasoline powered taxi is about 500,000 miles. When figuring out how much a carbon footprint will be from a machine you also have to figure out how much emissions it took to create the machine and add that in. It takes a couple of years before an electric vehicle breaks even on emissions, but that doesn’t figure in the pollution when the battery pack has to be disposed of. Experts call the depleted batteries hazardous waste. We are getting to the point where electric cars will have to start getting rid of batteries and one has to wonder how dangerous this will be to the environment? Something else which is not being counted is even if batteries can be reprocessed they will still be causing emissions by this process by about 48% of the original emissions which included mining. This is according to ScienceDirect.
|
