Don't ya sometimes just hate it when the weather people are right! They certainly hit it on the head when they told us the weather as going to get nasty this week.
The only alternative opinion I can come up with right now is about all those folks pointing to all this wild winter weather and asking "What Global Warming?"Sigh.
Look folks this kind of wild weather is just the sort of thing global warming causes! And considering how no body wants to bother the big time oil, gas or coal companies for fear of "hurting the economy," looks like we all better just get used to this kind of weather.
I just don't understand how switching to clean or sustainable energy sources will hurt the economy. Electricity is still electricity no matter how it is produced. It still needs electric power lines to get from here to there. As for all those folks working in the power plants, there will still be some need for some centralized power, I guess. Though I can see those power plants becoming smaller, and growing in number. Though frankly I'd rather see every home, farm, and business in the country producing it's own power plus some and sharing that extra out on the grid.
Oh, the coal miners will have to come up out of the mines but maybe they could clean out their lungs while building wind turbines and setting up solar panels out in the fresh air. Those folks who work on oil rigs could help putting up the big wind turbines that some think we need. Even better, they could use their drilling knowledge and skill to drill for water instead of gas or oil. Water that solar and wind generated power could split into hydrogen and oxygen so that the hydrogen could be bottled and used to run fuel cells, vehicles, or what ever else.
Of course we'd have to get the government to agree to not tax any power generated by sustainable means. That would give folks an even better reason to switch to the green energy producers. Then, guess what. There would be more green energy centered businesses for folks to work at. Okay, they might be small, employing only a few folks. But, if you had at least one of these small business in every small town and several in larger ones wouldn't that employ more folks than say, one big centralized power plant.
If we all had small home power plants then there would also be a need for local folks who could help install them, repair them and maintain them. Oh, looky there: More jobs. Local jobs.
Seems to me that switching to sustainable power sources could really help the economy if we stopped dilly dallying around, and did it ourselves instead of waiting for some big company to charge us out the wazoo to do it for us.
Of course out here in the country, those who have barns and several animals have the opportunity to turn the stuff they clean out of those barns into fuel and fertilizer. The stinky smell that wafts out of the barn could be the smell of money folks. It's called methane and it's the same thing they are drilling for out around Dallas and Ft. Worth. Only you don't have to mess up any aquifers by fracking to get it. All you have to do is figure out how to build a digest that will encourage the stuff you take out of the barn to give off even more of the gas and capture it. What to do with it then? Same thing you'd do with the stuff they pull out of the ground. Yeah. Burning it in vehicles. for heating,or running it through a fuel cell will release CO2 into the atmosphere same as the stuff pulled out of the ground but this will be recycled CO2.
Why is that important? Because it is the excess CO2 that is the problem and that comes from sources where it was 'sequesterd' a long time ago as coal or oil.
Shortly after I wrote this I saw NOVA program on channel 13. It is part of a series they are showing on 'making' things. This particular one was on making things clean and it had a lot in it about the green technologies for power. Look for it. Maybe you'll get some ideas.
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