Fezziwig wrote:
SRT wrote:
...
Gotta agree with you, Dick. Europe doesn't want to become involved, our political leadership is trying to decide their course of action and the rabid ISIS is advancing on Bagdad.
Europe is utterly distrustful of US leadership after the Bush/Cheney cabal lied and deceived to get them to send troops and money to Iraq and Afghanistan. That administration destroyed 70 years of carefully built trust by the USA.
SRT wrote:
This strife has gone on for centuries and will continue. A possible hope is to give each branch of the Muslims their own chuck of land to call their own and to just stand back and let them go at each other.
That's what we tried to do with the British Empire and the post WW1 nation-building and it all failed. It created the rifts we have now, e.g., Iraq vs. Iran, Israel vs. everyone, etc. Endless war, with one exception: the 1980 Egypt-Israel peace treaty created by Jimmy Carter.
SRT wrote:
Meanwhile OK the pipeline and be oil independent of other countries.
Almost all that oil will go to foreigners, like China. That XL pipeline is not intended for USA benefit, but we will pay the 'externality' costs in terms of loss of fresh water, land and river pollution, etc. The reason the XL crosses the USA is to get it to gulfport where it can be refined (leaving the pollutants behind in the USA) and shipped out to...China!
I suppose we could tell the US Army to take the XL by force from it's owners, Transcanada, but that might start international trade wars and hot wars.
SRT wrote: We have plenty for ourselves and could sell our extra refined products.
No, we don't have plenty. We've already discovered that the early Monterrey estimates were grossly overdone. We will get little if any petrol from XL. Fossil fuels still are inadequate
SRT wrote:Meanwhile we could thoroughly research a reliable alternate to the internal combustion engine.
We already have all that available, better engines, better fuels, etc. Besides the IC engine, per se, is not a problem. I've seen an old VW Kharma Ghea converted to hydrogen fuel, in 1974 (during the OPEC holdup), by a skilled home mechanic. And it ran! Hydrogen and ambient air went in, and water came out. It worked! A non-polluting IC engine.
Also, modern petrol IC engines with highly developed computer-controlled components, improved fuel mixes, catalytic converters, etc., are vastly better than old IC engines.
We have to make these improvements more widespread, for example in trucks, trains and ships, but the transportation monopolies have more strength than mere Americans.
We already know how to shift our energy programs to make an energy economy work efficiently, cheaply and with minimum environmental damage. But entrenched vested interests are able to resist change until that moment arrives when they decide to increase their power and their money by announcing to US citizens that we are on a path to disaster and must change IMMEDIATELY with a crash program that will be 100 times what it would have cost if we started in 1974, when we should have started. One of the components of that extra (unnecessary) cost to citizens will be "stranded assets" lawsuits from utility companies that will claim that the citizens, by taking civil political action, have cost them the capital costs of their equipment. They've already done that back in the 70s and 80s as States (cf. California Public Utilities Commission) so the USA Courts have established a track record of favoring such lawsuits (not a surprise since they are the main source of bribe money for judges and politicians).
We don't need more research (except the usual upgrade, update, new tech things), we need better policies. We need to break the hold of vested interests and over-sized monopolies that will consume everything if we let them. We can't let them tell us that new technology isn't ready so they can continue their wicked ways.
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