you'd think it was a joke, but it isn't. http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20090824/bs_bw/aug2009db20090821304909
I'm waiting for Cash for Illegal Aliens. Give me $4,500 per illegal and I'd even drive them back home to Mexico.
Poor journalism. This isn't anything new. My wife and I bought a new Washer/Dryer set last year and took advantage of all the rebates and tax credits that came along with buying high-efficiency models. The same programs were available for other household appliances.
You could claim mileage all the way to Mexico, but you could drop them off in a "Sanctuary City" like San Francisco...
These programs have been running for quite some years now - and are supposed to be a great help. I am actually not sure why helping this country to get away from energy dependency is a bad thing or a joke? I can see the oil barons of the middle east being upset about energy conservation programs in this country - but why would anyone else?
Is the trickle down not reaching your home? Every time an oil company takes a dump, it rains $100's on my house.
I'm all for energy conservation if it makes sense to me. I'd love to have solar heat in my home and not pay 100+ a month for heating. But the physics just aren't there yet to make it a good trade-off with cost/efficiency. Wind power is pretty cool, but isn't Pickens (one of those oil baron guys) getting laughed at/losing large amounts of cash for setting up the world's biggest wind farm in TX? Nuclear energy would be a great way to increase power and reduce cost (while reducing dependency on foreign oil), but you can't say the word nook-u-luhr to many people without hearing all kinds of bad science coming back at you. Would mag-lev trains criss-crossing the country reduce the amount of energy locomotives produce? Or make it so that there didn't have to me as many trucks? Or give a better alternative for flying, reducing the amount of jet pollution and gas used by planes? Brazil's been using sugar ethanol for almost 30 years--too bad, though, that we don't have vast amounts of sugarcane in the Heartland and corn's not the best agent to make ethanol with (though I'm doing my part by buying e85 from the 1 gas station in Western WA anytime I go past Longview. These are all good thoughts, and I'd like to see them implemented. Same with the skyscraper farms (I'd love to be able to just sit down and design one, then come up with 2B cash to implement it, but I'm a bit short of time and cash for that). But the science is still years/decades away (except for nuclear), and there isn't (to my limited knowledge)
i thought pickens abandoned his vision of a wind harvesting farm in the midwest? apparantly to actually transport the energy would be prohibitively expensive.
Transporting is not any more of a problem than it is to transport any other kind of energy you get from water falls or whatever. It's storage that is the problem - since the wind is unpredictable and the problem is how do you store it until it is needed... At least that's my understanding.
This basically tells you what I said - the issue is not transportation in itself - transportation is easy and happens all the time, especially if you want to go for HVDC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current - it is the "complex" infrastructure and approval process. My gut feeling is that if oil prices did not fall as they did during this economic melt-down - they would not have any issues with the "time-consuming approval-processes". The problem is that with oil prices down - and no guaranteed need for the electricity produced from these farms when wind happens (which is unpredictable) - they just choose not to go for it. Remember - most electricity in the US is coal based - the place where wind-farms currently have an advantage is when there is a need for relief-production which is done with oil. If oil is cheap - the utilities will just generate the extra electricity when they need it with oil, instead of pay for wind-produced electricity. Of course, going back to the entire cash for energy efficiency stuff - you will notice that the biggest efficiency rebates programs in this country are not funded by the govt. - but by the utilities, who want to ensure that they do not need to run the relief power-stations - because they are more expensive than what they are allowed to charge for the electricity they produce. It's a strange world we live in, where the guys making the product pay you to not consume too much of it...
