Obama: I Don't Have To Worry About Keystone Or ANWR. I've Got Nature's Miracle Fuel -- Algae

Algae.

President Obama admitted today that he does not have a "silver bullet" solution for skyrocketing gas prices, but he proposed alternative energy sources such as "a plant-like substance, algae" as a way of cutting dependence on oil by 17 percent.

"We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance, algae -- you've got a bunch of algae out here," Obama said at the University of Miami today. "If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we'll be doing alright. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America."

The Department of Energy (DOE) currently spends about $85 million on 30 research projects "to develop algal biofuels," according to the White House, which announced that Obama is committing another $14 million to the idea.

Yeah. And Solyndra was going to cut office power consumption by 93.4%.

In the future, we'll probably have laser power for aircraft. All aircraft must expend a considerable amount of fuel just to loft the mass of the fuel they carry to 10,000 feet. It's weird, but rockets, for example, expend something like 90% of their fuel just to lift the other 10% of their fuel.

So what if you had your fuel source on the ground, and beamed that power via a laser, which agitated a Flux Capacitor on an aircraft (you know, I'm not an engineer)? Then there would be no fuel wasted lifting the fuel up to 20,000 feet. The fuel would be on the ground. Weightless, as far as the aircraft knows. The aircraft would only carry enough fuel for an emergency landing.

Anyway, this is fun to talk about. It's also 40 years off.

Right now, we need oil. Oil is what the world runs on. Not lasers, and not fusion, and not fucking algae, for the love of God.

There will always be some technological innovations and occasionally a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, a watershed.

But your policy cannot be built up on the premise "And then a miracle happens," and further you certainly cannot schedule it to happen bureaucratically.

In 20 years no one will be talking about oil, maybe. Maybe we'll all have pebble-bed reactors in our homes, creating unlimited energy for pennies a week.

In which case we will also not be talking about God's Green Fuel, Algae.

And Obama is the man to figure this stuff out for us? The guy couldn't even submit a legal paper for publication when employed, supposedly, as a Constitutional professor at law school.

Even within the specialty field he was trained for, he had no insights, and did no hard work.

But sure, maybe he really can see 30 years into the future as regards.... Algal fuels.

This man has virtually no connection to the hard world we live in, of payrolls, work, hard choices, and trade-offs.

He lives in a fantasyland of algae and miracles. He is functionally a child. Things will happen because he wants them to happen. He wants the cookie, ergo the cookie jar will spontaneously generate a cookie.

"Algae"

It's what the hip kids are calling pot.

What a Bargain: Algae fuel will certainly affect the price of fuel.

It's 33 bucks per gallon.

via @slublog

posted by Ace at 03:27 PM

| Access Comments