Frank Rich views Obama as “Acting President” (NYT, July 27): “… America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not.”

As far as moving towards a different future we can finally believe in, there is only one way: to modify the profligate behavior of US citizens. How would that be achieved? By reducing the USA’s psychological and organizational dependency on wasting energy and frantic consumption. How to do this in turn? Some seem inclined to make incantations (we should do this, we ought to do that, within 10 years … yes, how exactly?)

Whereas the USA swam in oil since the nineteenth century, it is not so in most of the rest of the world. The USA was long the world number one producer of oil. An example: Texaco, an oil company from Texas, provided Hitler with oil to allow the Luftwaffe to fly Franco’s fascist army to Spain.

In Europe the energy situation was long difficult: Germany, France, Spain, Italy and their satellites (nearly 300 million people) have no oil. So they had to reduce their consumption as much as possible (Hitler’s made oil out of coal in W.W.II, but ultimately the Nazi army ran out of fuel). The way they did that was by very high taxes. The policy was so intelligent that it was followed by countries (such as Norway or Great Britain) that had a lot of oil.

There are 27 countries in the European Union, with half a billion citizens. It’s not exactly a backwaters.

Another strategy was to put taxes on non necessary consumption, according to the Added Value scheme (it allows to achieve higher rates than a sale tax, without cheating, and decreasing waste).

France reacted to the recent oil crisis by planing to rise further its high taxes on energy. Cars emitting more than 250 grams of CO2 per kilometer will be heavily taxed even more than they already are (the US average is 330 gms/km).

Of course, France is fanatical about the ecology and energy waste. Per inhabitant France emits less than one third of the CO2 than the USA does. france has been reacting to the oil crisis in all ways. EDF, the huge electric utility, is
building, in England and France, sea current power plants. Another way is drill, drill, drill. France has a little bit of oil, in the south west and the Paris area (1% of needs). Interestingly absolutely no one has been protesting.

The US left has been spastically opposed to drilling (although some of the drilling, like in the Destiny dome, is for natural gaz, CH4, which is mostly hydrogen, that is, clean). Thus one is led to an interesting alternative: either the US democrats are more ecological and anti business and anti oil than the French left, or they are FAKING IT. You decide.

Al Gore said on July 17, 2008: “Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within10 years.”

Challenges are amusing, but where is the money? Besides, France has been producing 95% of her “electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources” for more than ten years, but no one in France is suggesting that the situation is good.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

You are right: the solution for our climate crisis is very, very simple.

Before I go into it — on Transport — compared to the electricity sector everything is fiscally positive. You spend money on

#1 an 80% modal shift to fixed RAIL (TramTainLRV as one network) and move freight there too.) drive train uses 40x less energy per passenger mile

#2 Remaining 20% on Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle
You only increase electricity demand on a standard western grid from 10-20% Drive train uses about 7-10x less energy per passenger mile

Anyway here are the technologies to get us over the line. They are all commercially available now.. NO false hope “hydrogen” “Clean Coal” “Fusion” “Compressed Air Cars” or other time wasting pursuits that will result in failure.

1. Concentrating Solar Thermal Plants
- Distributed Power Towers using stirling or rankine cycle turbines with salt storage (Heliostat mirros pointing on tower)
-Distributed Power towers using Concentrating Solar Photovoltaic Spectrolab 40% today (theoretical to 60%) triple junction solar cells
-Distributed Power towers using Concentrating Solar Photovolatic Spectrolab 40% AND a light splitter a couple of metres in front of the aperture taking away the heat for running a second cycle.
-Distributed power tower technology with graphite block on top that directly takes solar insolation then recalling heat when required by pumping water through.

-Dish Concentrating PV
-Dish Concentrating solar with Stirling engine
-Dish concentration solar with highest temp steam in CSP and rankine
-Dish Concentrating solar with ammonia thermochemical dissasociation (Endothermic/exothermic reactor 97% efficient battery)

-Compact Linear Fresnel arrays

- Parabolic Trough Arrays

- Special coatings on all of the above so cleaning is not required, so less reflectivity occurs etc.

- Super insulation of houses
-Using Heat Pumps to heat instead of Gas/Electric
-Using passive solar design on all new houses
-retrofitting passive solar design features to existing housing stock
-Using Real time instantaneous heat pump hot water services (Such as “eco cute” hitachi and matsushita models in Japan) for boosting solar hot water
-No more gas end use, slowly end the use at open cycle power plants as energy security backup as you are rolling out renewables

- using direct solar heat for industrial steam which is the main use of end use gas and electricity in the industrial sector
- commercial buildings with air locks retrofit gas and electric hot water services.

-absorber chillers.

-massive Rail infrastructure and an 80% modal shift to rail (tram and trains as one shared mode) in the cities, Freight by rail frieght by light rail “cargo trams” refrigerated containers on board freight running from 25kv AC overhead line instead of onboard generators etc.

-modal shift 20% of city transportation to plug -in hybrid electric vehicles
-last mile trucking for getting final delivery of some freight.. electrified.
**Rail beats busses cause of 25kv overhead lines and less rolling resistance, 100 year lifespan of rail versus 14year for bitumen road

–Wind Power – Spain installed 3500MW of wind last year — will install 4300MW this year — just tool the factories up and make the turbines. Use the concentrating solar thermal tech above to provide the supply security to deliver a hybrid wind/solar baseload solution

–Plug in hybrids and other loads can be scheduled using smart meters controlled by the grid operator for cheaper tariff

–Close the loop on recycling so upto 100% of materials in to goods are the inputs for new products at the end of their lifecycle. Plastics that can’t be recycled aren’t licensed to be sold for instance.

–residual high density liquid fuels for range extending some PHEV trips and some rural /country last mile freight from Algal Biodiesel / Methanol
Use Algae feedstock – 40x the energy per unit of land versus ethanol/corn

The list goes on. Commercially available off the shelf now