Well, my point is not to support the left or right, a virtue of being an engineer is that it makes you a pragmatist.

I too am an engineer, and Obama and his neophyte Cabinet guys are NOT pragmatists!

We’ve got enough coal for about 400 years of our energy needs, and enough shale oil in the Rockies for over 100 years’ worth, if the Government will let us use them.

Instead we get Wacky Baracky standing in front of a dam telling us how to “store” wind power by using it to pump water up a dam, to be let back over the dam to generate electricity during a calm, dry spell. Any engineer knows that when you convert energy from one form to another (including a wind turbine, pump, or generator), you lose some to heat. Second Law of Thermodynamics, can’t get around it, and Congress can’t repeal it. So you get more energy out of a wind turbine without a dam than with one.

Plus, if you use a dam, you need another dam at the bottom to prevent the water from going down the river when you want to pump it. What happens to the darling little salmon and snail-darters and fishy-wishies downstream when their water is pumped the wrong way and their river dries up? They die…for a big bag of wind acting like a fish out of water.

Nothing wrong with wind power though–it just needs to be more efficient! I’ve seen a presentation by a company designing a wind turbine that runs like a jet engine in reverse, and uses an air-flow vortex to get the same power at half the diameter of a conventional three-bladed wind turbine, and can work at lower wind speeds. Shorter blades mean less stress and slower tip speeds, meaning less bird kill and batting the bats!

This company is still testing a prototype, but they’ve got millions in private venture-capital research funding. Did da gubmint help out? Naaaaaaah.

You want more energy, let the engineers do their work, and if it’s cost-competitive, they’ll find the money. Just keep the gubmint outta da way.

OVT: “We brought you Joseph R. Biden.”

“War, bombing…ask Gates what to do!”

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/1440284,w-obama-jesus-christ-hero-harris-poll021909.article

It’s very unfortunate that we are all going to pay for this fro many years to come past the departure of his Holiness, The One.

The claim that we’r all racists for jumping on this clow will begin in…three, two, one….

Energy=oil….whodathunkit?

milwife88 on February 20, 2009 at 7:42 PM

It doesn’t take a Nobel Laureate to.. Oh wait.

Admiral Stockdale…

cnredd on February 21, 2009 at 12:20 AM

Stockdale could have crapped in my cornflakes and I still would have shook his hand.

This is going to be long…ya hit a red button issue…

coldwarrior on February 20, 2009 at 10:06 PM

This is going to be short …

A battery powered car (it could have red buttons) in every garage and a nuclear power plant in every county.