Nov
2
The Weekend Link List
November 2, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Socialism has a hard time of it, naturally. One example is the ongoing shift of power from the democracy of Venezeula to the tyranny of Hugo Chavez. Just when the power hungry using socialism for cover think they have the economy worked out reality just keeps on going and going.
Victor Salmeron in El Universal discusses the state of economic failure that bedevils the nut Chavez. It’s quite well written and explains the pressures that continue to lure Chavez into more repressive moves to keep the country afloat. Imagine, all that money and still things work ever more poorly. The surprise isn’t that it’s happening, it’s that all that money is the root of the problem.
Hydrogen as a fuel has some wonderful attributes and a couple of problems. The big problem, long-term storage, hasn’t seen a really good solution yet. The other, producing it in the first place, has a few high potential methods in research. Meanwhile using it can be little more than storage and plumbing to run the car, as we know it today, a prodigiously wasteful method. The other is fuel cell and a paper out by Peter Strasser at the University of Houston adapted by Science Daily is showing how an alloy of platinum, a costly ingredient to making a fuel cell is being handled at the nanoparticle level to achieve much higher cell activity and one hopes a drop in cost.
The Wall Street Journal is one of the world’s premier publications and they have no reputation for supporting government sticking its nose into our business. On the other hand some problems are complex by their involvement in life, energy and fuel use being one. Here Joseph P. White in his Eyes on the Road column looks at an EPA number called “ton miles per gallon” and shows us that even as we drive the most efficient vehicles by ton miles per gallon the vehicles are far heavier thus setting us back. It’s a very interesting take on the problem of simply going some miles for the lowest use of fuel and shines some light on the problem.
Here’s a heads up on an example of what the policy makers will be selling over the next year as we start the US election year ending next November. Steve Milloy, rather famous for his “Junk Science” site gets a reprint at Fox News in overlooking one of the ideas floating about Washington DC and what is happening to it. See “Global Waming’s Trillion Dollar Turkey.” I got a good laugh from it.
Lastly here is 321energy.com’s link to the Simmon’s Slide show a link well worth passing around as it too offers a lot of very basic data for the new initiate in peak oil and new energy and fuel.
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