Dr. Schund, how can we supply America with all its electricity, too cheap to meter, using technology no more advanced than a tethered jackass?
Northern Alaska is awash in petroleum. ANWAR was already known to contain at least 10 elephants (billion bbl reservoirs) in the late 1970s. Being hard by Prudhoe Bay, 90% of the necessary pipeline is already in place. ANWAR is flat windswept -40 degree bottommost frozen circle of Hell in winter. Surface defrosted it is an infinite shallow swamp eructating so many mosquitoes and black flies that the sun dims behind their hovering clouds. ANWAR is a pristine Enviro-whiner paradise whose oil is Gaia's never to be blown sacred snot.
Burn algae. At 100% efficiency it would require only 15,000 mi2 of culture ponds to fuel America! (At real world 10% efficiency start to finish it would need 150,000 mi2, but we have lots of home foreclosures. Land is cheap - and a good investment.) Synthetic algae culture was massively government- and moron-subsidized. Grand facilities were built, giant sunlit vats or ponds were erected, then thermodynamics farted in its general direction. Check out www.oilgae.com - "New Powerful Laser System Could Create Fusion Energy from Waste."
Bionavita (sunny Redmond, WA), Algae Venture Systems (sunny Marysville, OH), PetroSun (sun-blasted Rio Honda, Texas, algae capital of the world!), Solazyme (sunny San Fancisco, CA), GreenFuel Technologies (sunny Cambridge, MA), Sapphire Energy (1000-liter plastic bags of algae), Blue Marble Energy (sunny Seattle, WA), Inventure Chemical (sunny Seattle, WA), Solena (sunny Washington, DC), Live Fuels (sunny Menlo Park, CA), Solix Biofuels (sunny Berkeley, CA), Aurora Biofuels (sunny San Francisco, CA), Aquaflow Binomics (sunny New Zealand), Bionavitas (sunny Snoqualmie, WA), Mighty Algae Biofuels (have they no shame? Sunny Redwood City, CA), Bodega Algae (sunny Cambridge, MA), Seambiotic (Israel. Due for a pro-active Muslim incursion), Cellena (Kina, HI; carefully sabotaged by Shell in the nicest possible ways).
All New Age, post-industrial, Gen-Y energy hallucinations from fuel ethanol to desert giant solar arrays melting salt are ludicrous. The largest consumer of natural gas in Canukistan is its Athabasca tar sands, ostensibly producing "cheap" petroleum. That Enviro-pig merely digs the crap out of the ground and separates away the dirt.
Ponderously expensive consultancies (friends of friends) did lunch, played a round of golf, then ruminated contextual historicity of America's energy predicament over brandy and cigars. Nuclear power was terrible. It still worked despite the EPA. 1850s' whale oil crisis was solved by petroleum. 1700s' Great Britain answered deforestation with coal. Dang, aren't those what we use today?
Egypt enslaved Jews. It was like American agriculture and Mexicans, except the Jews wanted to leave. Taxpayers were already well broken feeding the Officially Sad (and paying user fees for the privilege lest the privileged unduly sacrifice). Why not sweat them for another ducat? They were too fat according to Official statistics. Put some fat into the fire.
Washington shortly thereafter announced the National Energy Volunteer Endeavor. Purchased at their own expense (by law) to make America strong, every taxpayer was required to briefly run a treadmill each day to contribute a mere 1 kW-hr of electricity into the grid. Penalty for NEVER violation was set at $100/day and given enforcement priority. Federal employees and the Officially Sad were exempt.
Run the numbers. 1 kw-hr = 860.637 Calories. The average adult burns 2000 Calories/day. American wallets were exsanguinated but American paunches, butts, and thighs were virgin territories all but begging for Federal penetration. NEVER was no more heinous a withdrawal than Federal plus Social Security and Medicare taxes.
The average person can sustain 150 watts of work . NEVER would be a minor morning chore, less then seven hours, to safeguard America against foreign energy terrorism. Taxpayers could alternatively volunteer $36,500/year and buy their way out - like using the commuter lane while driving an 11 mpg 2007 Dodge RAM 1500 with air conditioner and surround sound blasting.
3500 Calories reside in one pound of body fat. All Washington wanted was 90 lbs of your flesh every year. That leaves you plenty. US annual electrical generation is 4.1 TW-hrs. 100 million taxpayers doing their daily duty would generate
(108 taxpayers)(1000 watt-hrs/day)(365.2442 days/year)/(1012 watt-hrs/TW-hrs) = 36.52 TW-hr electricity/year.
We'd be rolling in electricity - too cheap to meter! 100% rechargeable battery cars and still, too cheap to meter! Zero fossil fuel emissions, zero nukular piles, zero fuel corn from maize pimp Archer-Daniels-Midland and still... too cheap to meter!
It was a TOP SECRET/Lotus Eater disaster. Every electric utility would be exposed as the politically connected criminal enterprise it was. In a twitch of racial and ethnic jackbooted State compassion, America will not be deluged by blackouts this summer. It will be brownouts all this year. Send your complaints to Mexico.
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