Powering America Things don’t seem to be working out the way the administration thought. We just are not ready for such mandated policies. Take the business with electric cars. There is a sort of silent revolution going on. Electric car sales have slowed and some of the big manufactures are cutting back on electric car and truck manufacturing because they just have too much of a back log and are losing money with electric vehicles. Some have said the electric car was just being bought by those who had a gasoline car already and most of those who wanted to do that have already. I don’t know about that, but I see even Tesla has had to keep lowering prices to keep up sales. There seems to be quite a few reasons most people don’t want electric cars right now. The inconvenience of using them on long trips is one reason. There are just far fewer charging stations than gas stations so the trips have to be carefully planned. When a charging station is found there could be a line and each car might take up to an hour to charge. If it is too hot or too cold, the battery range is reduced. If people live in apartments they may have no where to comfortably put their cars and they can’t have a home charger. Not all charger stations work with all car brands. People may not want to spend the extra thousands of dollars over the cost of a similar gas operated vehicle. Something else came to the forefront with electric cars lately and that is the body parts are far more expensive to replace since they are much bigger in some cases and much more complex. A fender can cost many thousands of dollars more because it could be part of the roof structure for example. One person who owned an electric car stated he was in shock when he went to replace a damaged fender. The shop wanted over $19,000. It isn’t only electric vehicles which are in trouble, the companies making devices to generate so called green energy are starting to have problems. The Dutch company installing wind turbines in New Jersey is calling it quits there. They claim they have lost over a billion and a half dollars and want to cut their losses. Could this be a sign other companies are in the same boat and may soon stop building green devices and installing them? We have to remember the wind turbines are not all that green, they use copious amounts of oil to lubricate the mechanicals. It seems everything being pushed as green has its flaws and is not truly green. There is nothing greener than hydroelectric power. True they also need lubrication but not as much as those turbines. The new salt cooled nuclear reactors are also pretty clean. Not only are they cheaper to build, but don’t need a safety dome. The nuclear waste is trapped in the salt and forms a glass which can be disposed of. Salt cooled reactors are more efficient since they operate at higher temperatures. They produce much less waste and are far safer since they operate at lower pressure. If the administration really wanted us to become greener they would have insisted on using this new technology to build more nuclear power stations. Some of these reactors don’t even use solid fuel so there is nothing to dispose of. We were not ready to go all green in a sudden movement. To do that more efficiently we need to phase out things like gasoline powered cars and replace them with hydrogen powered ones. They don’t produce carbon. Recently the South Koreans announced they had designed and built an engine of 2.4 liters just for hydrogen fuel. This was a very important step because prior to this the car industry was experimenting with converting gas engines and there were problems such as backfires and other problems. The Korean engine seems to run seamlessly. On top of all this if we really wanted to get greener, it was far more important to convince China and India to cut back on emissions than anything we could do just in America. Even if we became totally green it would make no difference because China and India just keeps increasing the pollution. China keeps building coal fired plants and now is said to have more than the total for the rest of the world and they are getting a pass. One of the big problems in India is the burning of waste. India is now the world’s 8th most polluted country. A list of countries which were the biggest polluters was released and it listed the ten countries which polluted the most. They were: I think it is obvious the best course right now is the pursuit of a treaty to reduce the level we dump CO2 into the atmosphere. It certainly won’t be easy and China has to have its third world status taken away since this relieves them of all guidelines. Secondly more research has to be made and shared on cleaning up and cutting down on this CO2. We may yet find a way to reduce it if we all try without having to cut down on manufacturing. Think about this, if China could get down to even the same level as us it would be an incredible contribution to cleaner air. After all, China is breathing the same air as us. This is really not a political issue, but an environmental one. The idea of cleaning up the atmosphere is something all countries have to participate in. What good is it if some countries do it and others just keep increasing the dumping of CO2 into the air? If we could get the polluting countries of the world to build the new salt cooled nuclear plants and we started building them it would go a long way in pollution reduction. Just getting those older plants offline would be a great contribution. We could use the money which the United States has allocated toward green energy plants to start construction.
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