Letters to the Editor
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Actually
He has some good ideas. The idea of a prize to motivate the development of a hydrogen engine is a fantastic idea. Once businesses and corporations realize that there's a huge untapped market in green energy, they'll be outdoing each other to bring this technology to fruition. If I remember correcly, Kerry had an idea for an "Apollo Program" to develop green technology.
We have to give corporations and engineering firms a greater motivator beyond simple altruism- talking dollars will get their attention.
I'm no fan of Gingrich's activity in the 90's- but it is important to realize that many Conservatives still look to him and his messages. This is important, as it may make many Conservatives active in the fight against global warming.
Like him, or hate him- when he says liberals can own the debate and ultimately fall behind or lose- he's right.
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Sorry, Newt, family values voter here. I don't vote for dead beat parents.
This area of personal life is very political for me. How could I countenance ever voting for someone who on the one hand touts self-reliance but on the other puts his ex-wife and children in the position of needing hand-outs from church and government? Newt is one of the parents that made the huge child support bureaucratic apparatus necessary. In the bad old days of the 1970s, a parent could simply jump a state line and thumb his/her nose at an ex-spouse. To remedy the situation, legislation put into place a massive system of governmental enforcement of child support obligations. The compound effect of thousands of Newt-like parents is a big government system of tax intercepts and wage garnishments which are often the only reliable way for millions of children to recieve the support that they need and deserve. Layers of people involved in the enforcement process include all the individuals at the support collection units, district attorneys, defense attorneys, judges, deputies and other law enforcement.
So Newt cares about the environment, hmmm. Show me.
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And
The idea of the prize is better than tax incentives, because a working model must be produced before the money is given. You want a billion dollars? Show me the engine! This too would cut down on the slow development and waste of funds as mentioned by a previous poster in regard to DSL bandwidth.
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A Problem Poorly Defined is a Problem Poorly Solved
I'm no Newt fan and find him a pernicious influence in politics. However, I can't blame him any more for the earth's environmental tailspin than most well meaning liberals.
Both sides are trying to solve environmental problems with environmental solutions like recycling or using bio-fuels (both good ideas.) But we're killing biodiversity and raising global temperatures because we're overpopulated with humans and American style consumerism is spreading around the world. We aren't willing to drive less, we just want cheaper, non-polluting fuels! Since American-style conspicuous consumerism, and the wealthy class it generates, rely on increasing populations I don't see these problems getting solved at all, but rather exacerbated.
How we are living is not sustainable. While the reasonable, conserving and "green" lifestyle habits are things we need to do to make it sustainable, they won't make enough difference if there are too many of us, as I think there already are.
The Republicans and Democrats both want lots of money, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with Liberty and Justice for All their friends. This makes them both loath to rock the economic boat they and their friends are in, even though it will eventually sink because there are too many in it.
We can never get a real handle on environmental or social problems when we are always off balance trying to accommodate increasing numbers of us. Catch 22: Keeping things off balance with more and more people is where the big money is and that gets votes by promising a cut of the riches to the rest of us.
Bad deal and dumb deal.
Hermit
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Always with the threats
"They can own the issue forever and get nothing done. Or they can reach out and decide to have a bipartisan discussion and get something done"
Meaning, do it my way or we do nothing. I think we've been doing it your way for about the last 7+years there Newty and frankly you and yours have screwed the pooch big time. Now you have "solutions" - if the liberals will bend over and take them, that is,
I've had enough of the Republicans and their nuclear options and suicide pacts.
Get bent pal.
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No.
How about "no."
How about "no" to sky-god worshipping white-male imperialists who want to turn the clock back to 1830 and the empire back to 1948.
How about "no" to people who feel neither guilt nor shame at the systematic, institutionalized racism applied to our continent's first settlers and African slaves, and their decendants?
How about "no" to old, white men who spend so much time and energy trying to figure out how to control a woman's uterus (especially now that the hysterectomy has gone out of fashion). Why? Is it out of jealousy?
No. How about a "no" to those dirty, nasty men who will not let two people who are in love have the same rights as any other couple in love because they had the misfortune of being born with the same sex organs. These same dirty nasty men who seek illicit and unsafe trysts in public restrooms or prey on young gay men or use gay male prostitutes, paying extra for the privilege of going without a condom -- as if the threat of HIV is as unreal to them as their own homosexual urges.
A thousand times no!
Surely, polite society will take up the mantle of green policy, slowly, ineffectively, deliberately, as long as it pleases the shareholders.
But I'll be damned if that means I have to cast a vote in favor of the enemy of humanity and progress and liberty, these white men and their angry, racist, sociopathic, narcissistic sky god: truly, they created him in their image, and continue to fashion his countenance to fit their insatiable needs.
Two words: fuck Gingrich!
Cheers!
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More on incentives
The idea of a prize to motivate the development of a hydrogen engine is a fantastic idea. Once businesses and corporations realize that there's a huge untapped market in green energy, they'll be outdoing each other to bring this technology to fruition. If I remember correcly, Kerry had an idea for an "Apollo Program" to develop green technology.
We have to give corporations and engineering firms a greater motivator beyond simple altruism- talking dollars will get their attention.
DQuintanaNY,
I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but - I'm sorry to say - Newt's hydrogen engine ideas are stupid. The Department of Energy, auto companies, and many others have been working to get hydrogen engines off the ground for years - and have already spent as much as the $1 billion dollar prize trying. DOE targets for hydrogen storage are already looking wildly optimistic: Presently, you just can't store enough hydrogen per gram of storage materials (metal-organic frameworks, light-weight complex hydrides, destabilized binary hydrides, intermetallic hydrides, modified lithium amides, and other on-board reversible hydrides) to make the engines practical - and even if it could be done at some point in the future, $1 billion will be a laughably small reward for all the research money that will have to spent to make it there. (see http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/2003_storage_solicitation.html)
And that is just the storage problem. No one knows how to generate hydrogen in the first place without either using fossil fuels to do it, or using some other energy source - which, even if it were renewable - would pose the question - why not find a way to make electric cars better if the hydrogen alternative requires one to, say, convert electricity generated by a wind turbine via water splitting into hydrogen. Hydrogen generation introduces another step in the process that will waste more energy.
Basically, I think that a large fraction of the hydrogen research community knows full well that the "hydrogen car" and the "hydrogen economy" are the Bush administration's version of the strategic defense initiative (a.k.a., SDI, a.k.a. "Star wars"). Easy to make nice graphics and powerpoint presentations for and easy for history professors like Newt to bullshit about, but harder than hell to actually make work - an absolutely impossible to do with a measly $1 billion.
Incentives like Newt's have a place, but that place is not engine design where extremely mature industries are in place already (autos, for example) and the players will never again include a smart guy tinkering in his basement.