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Archive for June 2008

Common sense solution to energy crisis

Newt Gingrich offers common sense solution to energy crisis. Watch his video.

Alternative energy source for vehicles: wood chips.

Gas prices spark interest in alternative energy source for vehicles: wood chips.

It’s very real, and there is nothing new about it. Many people my age and older will remember.

It’s not funny. The other day we had to buy a new washing machine. It cost us just under $500. After we got back to town, I filled up our truck. That cost me another $138. Mind you, with the amount of driving we can afford now, that’ll be good for a couple of years or more, as long as no one figures out how to get a siphon hose into the truck’s gas tank (or perhaps he may even take the whole truck again, as they did last year).

There is a solution to gas shortages and prohibitive gas prices that is about 70 years old that our neighbour (and even owners of buses) used, “der Holzvergaser” (”the wood-gasifier”). That required a steel container about the size and shape of a hot-water tank to be installed in the trunk of the car. It stood upright and projected through the lid of the trunk. It required a hole to be cut through the trunk lid — eh, come on, what’s a hole in the trunk lid when there is nothing that you can get or afford to put into your gas tank?

I don’t know what the gas mileage was per sack of wood chips. The neighbour’s car made a top speed of maybe 40 klicks and every few miles (for him it was about three miles) one had to stop to stoke the gasifier to keep the fire going that produced the smoke that kept the car going. Now and then the “gas” lines and a few traps had to be cleaned out to remove the creosote and tar. It stank like the dickens, but the car would run (as long as one had enough patience for the warm-up period; if I remember right, that was about a half hour or more). I guess a big advantage was that if one ran out of wood chips, it was always possible to top-off the tank as long as there was a fence nearby.

You think that I am joking? Not at all. Check this Mercedes truck, this Adler car, and here is a whole raft of wood-gasifiers installed on various more modern vehicles and a few older stationary engines (click on a given thumbnail image at the latter web page to see a full-blown photo). That was a hobby for the owners until just recently, when it became a necessity.

I never thought that things like that would become real again without having Hitler around to make them necessary. Although Hitler caused a general gas shortage and gas rationing to develop, even he didn’t have the gall to drive gas prices through the roof. For that to happen we needed a few people far more powerful than Hitler was.

So, let’s see. A barrel of syncrude costs about $16.50 to produce, make it about another five dollars to turn that into gasoline and another dollar to pump it into the fuel tank at the service station. Roughly calculated, that leaves $53.42 in “windfall profits” for the oil companies and only $75.92 in profit for the provincial and federal governments per barrel.

Der Holzvergaser gets to look better all the time. A tip: stock up on highway flares. One of them will light the wood gasifier without any effort at all. Don’t try to use matches. Don’t worry about driving slow and holding up traffic. There will be less and less traffic as prices go up.  That is the aim of the game, right?  Got to save that globe, and no price it too high for that, right?

35 Inconvenient Truths

The errors in Al Gore’s movie

By Lord Monckton, UK

A spokesman for Al Gore has issued a questionable response to the news that in October 2007 the High Court in London had identified nine “errors” in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The judge had stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note making clear the mainstream scientific position on these nine “errors”, he would have made a finding that the Government’s distribution of the film and the first draft of the guidance note earlier in 2007 to all English secondary schools had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children….

Ms. Kreider says the IPCC’s results are sometimes “conservative,” and continues: “Vice President Gore tried to convey in good faith those threats that he views as the most serious.” Readers of the long list of errors described in this memorandum will decide for themselves whether Mr. Gore was acting in good faith. However, in this connection it is significant that each of the 35 errors listed below misstates the conclusions of the scientific literature or states that there is a threat where there is none or exaggerates the threat where there may be one. All of the errors point in one direction – towards undue alarmism. Not one of the errors falls in the direction of underestimating the degree of concern in the scientific community. The likelihood that all 35 of the errors listed below could have fallen in one direction purely by inadvertence is less than 1 in 34 billion….(Full Story)

Global Warming Reality Check

None of the Global Circulation Models (GCMs) tell anything about reality, against which all of them must be validated. Yet, the GCMs are the primary source of the information that fuels the global warming hysteria.

Reality check: UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature variations since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites.

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