Re: Art, where's the buzz on nanotech saving America today?

Straydog wrote:


On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Threeducks wrote:

Straydog wrote:



On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, BMJ wrote:




If anything, nano's dead and has been replaced by the hydrogen economy
and other high oil price chicanery cerca late 70s malarkey. What gives?
Have the spin doctors on Charlie Rose lost their will to b.s. till they
drop?



It isn't so much the hydrogen economy but anything to do with climate change and what can be done to reduce its effects. You may have noticed that biofuels



In Brazil, 20% of what goes into gastanks of cars is bio-ethanol. Today. Already. And, just about market priced with gas. No fantasy. All reality.


I'm not convinced this stuff is the way to go. It's more expensive than regular gasoline, and you get fewer MPG.


Do you deny that there will one day be a planet earth and the remaining petroleum will either be already burned up or so prohibitively expensive that we will have no choice but to burn something else, whether it be coal or renewable? Surely even if you made the assumption that all of the earth is pure oil, then at our present burn rate any kid who can calculate simple algebra would be able to predict the day when it will all be burned up.

I don't deny that we will eventually run out of oil. However, it takes energy to make ethanol. Does it take more energy to make ethanol than it does gasoline? The power you get out of a gallon of ethanol is less than a gallon of gasoline, so you have to burn more. Ethanol is currently more expensive than gasoline. How are you going to get people to use something that gives you less performance and less MPG and costs more money?

We have an infinite amount of sun coming down. That isn't going to run out. Wind isn't going to run out, either. Corn? That takes energy to grow and we may very well run out of that.


The guys who are basically

converting garbage to ethanol may have a market (and I applaud their efforts), but the idea of growing corn to make ethanol is a dumb one.


We'd better start somewhere and Brazil is ahead of us. I also heard on NPR radio some years ago that, of all places, Kenya generates more percapita electricity by solar cells than anywhere else in the world.


We could just line solar cells up in the desert if we wanted to. Plenty of sun and land out there. Even if the efficiency is low, if you have enough panels you can generate a lot of electricity.
.

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