Alternative Energy: Viable?

D.B. Cooper wrote

"If I were king" I would have an X-prize type of competition.  A billion dollars for the first group (company, university, whatever) to come up with a solar capturing technology (photovoltaic) that can be commercialized and exceeds <insert threshold here>.

I would have a second X-prize of a billion dollars for the first group who could retain that electricity <insert threshold here>  and have it be commercialized.

Thomas Friedman is right... I'm a big fan of his.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

In April 2003 Friedman said that Arab journalists who talked about the US ‘occupation’ of Iraq were guilty of ‘Saddamism’. In August 2003 Friedman wrote: ‘This is an occupation.’

In 2007 he surmised that Iraqis ‘hate each other more than they love their own kids’. In 2009 he hoped that they’d learned from America’s ‘million acts of kindness’ and ‘profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together’.

In 2005 Friedman argued: ‘We have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there.’ Earlier this year, he wrote: ‘For all of the murderous efforts by al-Qaida to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.’ Never mind that in 2006 he said: ‘It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.’

Tom Friedman is wrong about everything, and Tom Friedman don't care!

Friedman actually styled himself a critic of the war he so strongly advocated for, but the path of his criticism was as Greenwald described:


(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

If only the ungrateful wogs would have done what they should have done then everything would have been great.

Thomas Friedman wrote

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could

ScottyJack wrote

CampCoalChoker!!!

Z wrote

I've posted this several times that storage is the big issue with Solar and Wind.  Hydro storage is one solution but it has limits and wont work every where particularly in the Western US that have water issues to start with.

Battery farms could work but what are the environmental impacts or making large volumes of batteries - its a very non green industry.

Milo Maltbie wrote

mm, p.e.