Wow, RE, that's some post. Totally dismal. While it's the best rendition I've read on why China and it's yuan can't take over for the USA and the US$, you are off base on the USA's energy capacity. We have enough cheap coal to run in existing infrastructure to buy us some time to put oil rigs off the Florida coast and build nukes in the Mojave or Alaska. This would require putting the environmental extremists back in their box.

However, if

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You CANNOT base a fiat money system on a shrinking economy, its antithetical to the whole concept of fiat money. You cannot pay interest, thus the paper holds no value whatsoever.

is valid and IMO it is, then, without a reset/debt clearing, all fiat is worthless. This is inherently why Bernanke is so focused on re-inflating at any cost to maintain the illusion of a growing economy and the long-term ability to pay interest. Ultimately, there must be a reset/debt clearing (Jubilee) for any fiat to continue with any value other than zero. So, the first nation to do that may win the fiat contest.

Genics, if your nation's people would pull their heads out of their asses and stop being serfs to the crown instead of CITIZENS you'd have a shot at regaining your former glory.

It all starts with this pesky thing we in America call "The Bill of Rights." "

Tbh, karl i always considered you very knowledgeable and wise but from this post it is clearly not the case. I was thinking about this last night, why are you even talking about the bill of rights? Britain had a parliament before your bill of rights or constitution had even been created. So maybe check your facts before trying to make out your country is more free than ours.

Genics,

Yeah, you had a parliament... but what is that parliament doing for you now?

As far as I can tell it is slowly selling you down the river and dissolving your country into just another region of the EU.

Why did you even bother to fight against Napoleonic France or Wilhelmine Germany?

You're ending up in about the same place as if you hadn't fought.

Not only that but I'm sure you have noticed your government does not trust you to own any kind of gun- or even a sharp knife or a heavy beer mug.

I submit to you that since they don't trust you with any of that they certainly don't trust you to make any more important decision- like who should run your country.

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Tbh, karl i always considered you very knowledgeable and wise but from this post it is clearly not the case. I was thinking about this last night, why are you even talking about the bill of rights? Britain had a parliament before your bill of rights or constitution had even been created. So maybe check your facts before trying to make out your country is more free than ours.

Yeah, that Parliment has protected you real well, hasn't it?

You yourself said you're ****ed over there. So much for that vaunted "parliment."

Im not disagreeing that our parliament is crap. Just thought your post was a bit ignorant that's all, going on about the bill of rights

Its "ignorant" to believe that The Bill of Rights is important?

Bye-bye Genics, at least in my TICKER threads.

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We have enough cheap coal to run in existing infrastructure

That is so true, i forgot about that. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal, and it can be used in so many ways.

I think we have been using foreign oil so that we can save our own, but look where it's gotten us. Why can't we just pull the plug on foreign oil, use our own, and use clean coal to boot? We would have enough energy for 200 years. And in that 200 years, I am confident there would be some sort of new future energy invention to releive oil and coal. This would allow plenty of transition time for Big Oil to transition to the new technology, it would keep the oil workers (little guys) employed, and it would lower the domestic cost of energy and free us of foreign dependence. It seems so easy...

We have enough cheap coal to run in existing infrastructure . . .

Also, natural gas has gone through a minor (and quiet) revolution over the past few years - the shale plays (and the US has lots of shale) have given the US about 100 year's worth of natural gas from less than 10 years worth in a very short time. That is one of the reasons that natural gas has become so cheap lately - it is much more of a commodity now and only the low-cost producers will win in the natural gas market now. Canada has lots of shale too.

http://www.albertaventure.com/?p=3117

Wondering what the feasibility is of converting cars/trucks to NG. I know it's done regularly, but I'm looking at long-term cost-benefit analysis.
Does anyone know of a realistic study?

CNG works BUT...

1. The tank size is prohibitive for reasonable range.
2. The conversion costs are moderate (~$3k including the tank)
3. You need a high-pressure compressor to fill with.

"Gasoline" engines run just fine on natural gas as a fuel and metering is fairly simple. Diesel-cycle engines can also run on natural gas; the fuel itself is a simple hydrocarbon and burns well in either.

For city buses and such the tank issue is a non-event since they have plenty of space available to hold a tank sufficient for a shift, at which point they need to return to the depot for the driver anyway. For short-haul delivery (e.g. in-city) it also works for the same reason.

For general transport use its a bigger problem; the typical car, replacing its fuel tank with a CNG crosslinked composite tank (best deal in terms of storage and pressure capacity per unit of size) yields roughly 100 miles of range. Suitable for most commuters but with no public CNG fill infrastructure you've got a problem for anything beyond that, and at typical highway speeds few people would tolerate having to stop and refuel every one to two hours.

Natural Gas is a gas at any reasonable temperature and pressure and as such the volume of gas that can be stored in the tank is a direct function of pressure. There is also a potential safety issue in a collision as structural failure of the tank results in immediate release of all of the stored energy of compression (and a potential fireball if there's an ignition source available); if you've ever seen the damage an exploding scuba tank does you have an idea of the sort of energy release that can occur. Its pretty damn impressive.

We have enough cheap coal to run in existing infrastructure

Won't be using coal if it's up to O's Green jobs czar:

VAN JONES: This movement is deeper than a solar panel. Deeper than a solar panel. Don't stop there. Don't stop there. No, we're going to change the whole system. We're going to change the whole thing. We're not going to put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. We want a new system.


http://www.glennbeck.com/content/article....

CNG: 15% to 20% of vehicles in Argentina run on natural gas. Egypt has a fairly high percentage too (I think it was around 15%). It's already happening in other parts of the world.

Several of the smaller independents are joining together to promote natural gas as an alternative fuel for vehicles. Things are happening in Oklahoma where they are starting to build refueling stations. It won't make sense to have all vehicles run on CNG but it does make sense to have a certain percentage running on CNG.

Here is an example of what's happening there in Tulsa:

http://www.tulsabusiness.com/article.asp....

“When we put tax incentives in place earlier this year to encourage natural gas usage as a transportation fuel in our state, this type of project is exactly what we had in mind,” Benge said. “Apache has made a private financial commitment to CNG by building this station and in the process is helping reduce our country’s dependence on foreign oil. I am hopeful that the legislation we put in place will continue to help build CNG infrastructure and encourage the use of local energy resources, which will be a benefit to our state’s economy as a whole. Oklahoma is poised to lead the way nationally in alternative-fuel vehicles, and this legislation is only the beginning. We must secure our energy future in order to secure our economic future.”

Apache built its first refueling station in Oklahoma because the state’s incentives improved the economic return for the project, Farris said. Apache, which is fueling its CNG field vehicles with gas produced from the company’s wells in western Oklahoma, is planning to build two additional CNG refueling stations in the state.

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Wow, RE, that's some post. Totally dismal. While it's the best rendition I've read on why China and it's yuan can't take over for the USA and the US$, you are off base on the USA's energy capacity. We have enough cheap coal to run in existing infrastructure to buy us some time to put oil rigs off the Florida coast and build nukes in the Mojave or Alaska. This would require putting the environmental extremists back in their box.

I tend to disagree that coal reserves and NG here in the US can provide a bridging source of power while we go digging for more oil and/or start building nukes in the Mojave. About the last place you would build a nuke would be here in Alaska, there aren't enough people living here to justify the cost of a reactor, and you certainly wouldn't be running high voltage lines from here to the lower 48. LOL.

Anyhow, while there is substantial coal left, its mostly sub-bituminous and lignite. Anthracite reserves are as thin these days as Oil is. These grades of coal are relatively low in energy content, as is NG. Also far as the coal goes nasty stuff to burn.

Even if you were to use coal, you could only really use it to generate electricity, and then you run into the same problems of economics you run into with building a whole lot of nukes. It would take 20 years easy to get enough plants online to handle the increased load, and then you would need to upgrade the transmission lines as well, which would cost even more than the plants. Even if you pulled off that stunt, while you might run some cars on Lithium-Ion batteries running $5000 a pop, you would be mighty hard pressed to run tractors, back hoes, front end loaders and the like on battery power. Again you run into energy density problems in what a battery can hold vs what a tank of gas can hold. Its just not a viable substitute.

In any event, by the time we might try any of this nonsense, the dollar and the renminby both will have gone the way of the Dinosaur, so I am pretty hard pressed to figure out how it might be financed. You think in the Reset people will buy Power Bonds from Goldman? With what will they buy the bonds? Promise to Pay Notes for their Great Grandchildren?

RE

1.2 % of the wehicle fuel use in Sweden is compressed gas, a little more then half of it is biogas. The investments are dominated by big energy companies and municipialities and the usual inital customers are regional bus fleets and municipiality service wehicles and then commercial taxis and misc consumers.

It is very popular as a bus fuel since it is clean burning and one of the more efficient ways of increasing city center air quality. Another decade of low yielding investments and we will have almost all of the core services with commerical local distribution, garbage trucks, busses, etc running independant of imported oil. (Leaving more petrol for your SUV:s! ;-) )

Black Gold!!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bp-says....

Alaska is perfect for nuclear reactors because the advantage of operating having a colder heat sink for your condensers. Based on the temperatures of northern Alaska compared to southern Texas you could be looking at as much as 10% gain in thermal efficiency.

I would see that effect all the time when I was a reactor operator on a submarine. The difference in terms of reactor power necessary to produce a given engine output between operating in the Persian Gulf in the summer and the north Atlantic in the winter is very noticeable. We wouldn't see 10% because the ocean doesn't get as cold as the air and because the machinery was designed for a wide operating range rather than optimized for a specific temperature but it was still significant.

Even in a reset some people will have money for bonds, just not me...

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Even in a reset some people will have money for bonds, just not me...

If anybody does have any money left after a reset, they won't keep it very long if Goldman underwrites the Bond issue.

RE

Goldman and offspring will have megabucks to buy...banksters always fund banksters don't they?

Yes, you are 100% correct, GM Sachs will suck them dry.

And, now, a moment in history as I recall the lone young female tied to the railroad tracks because the evil bankster has thrown her and granny out of their home - revisiting cartoons of my youth...ah, yes, green shoots

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Alaska is perfect for nuclear reactors because the advantage of operating having a colder heat sink for your condensers. Based on the temperatures of northern Alaska compared to southern Texas you could be looking at as much as 10% gain in thermal efficiency

I'm quite sure it would be more efficient in producing the power, it would however be highly inefficient in resource expenditure per capita. Florida's Progress Energy estimated the cost at building 2 Nukes for FL would be around $17B. So figure we build one of those here to power the state for $8.5B. Construction costs here would probably be significantly more for any number of reasons, but take that as a bottom figure. With a population of around 650,000, it would cost each and every Nanook up here and all the Papooses $13,000 each just to build the thing. Then you have to add in the yearly operating costs, including the none to cheap price of the fuel. Then add to that the cost of decommissioning said reactor at the end of its lifespan, when all the tubing has turned to swiss cheese from constant irradiation. Add to that the cost of stringing power lines all over the state, because if you just used it to power up Anchorage, the Mat-Su Valley and Fairbanks where you have high voltage lines strung some already it would only serve around 450,000 people, which would then increase building costs per capita to around $18,888 for the Nanooks.

Add to this the fact Alaska is among the most geologically active spots on the planet, home to the largest Earthquake ever recorded on the North American continent at 9.2 on the Richter scale which absolutely LEVELLED Anchorage in 1964. You wanna put this reactor at the foot of Mt Redoubt? LOL. Who is going to insure this reactor? AIG? ROFLMAOPIMP.

Yup, Alaska is a PERFECT spot for a Nuke! This is the kind of forward thinking that Amerika is famous for, so I have no doubt whatsoever we will build one here.

RE

The entire state of Alaska is a fault line? Gimme a break - not true of Cali - not true of the frozen place either. There are already a plethora of pipe lines from Alaska to the lower 48, they are tons more expensive to build/maintain than a bunch of underground electric cables would be. And, oh, yes, they fail because they don't run the pigs through them often enough to maintain them. Aren't they also subject to earthquakes? What about San Onofre twin reactors, aren't they on a fault line?

You put them in Florida and there's hurricanes. There's natural disaster areas all over the planet. Alaska isn't special that way. At least earthquakes don't take out the WHOLE state in a matter of a days.

Get real dude - life is RISKY!

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Get real dude - life is RISKY!

I made plenty of money doing Risk Analysis in da bad old days. Quantifying risk is part of the equation here, and as the tag line goes over on Zero Hedge, "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone goes to Zero".

The issue you have here is that the more risk you drop into the system, the shorter the timeline gets here. Vastly multiplying the number of Nukes we run vastly multiplies the risk inherent in the system, and its about as stupid to put Nukes in FL or in AK as it is to build a massive infrastructure for refining Oil in the Houston Ship Channel. Its going to go down, its not a matter of if, just when.

You cannot keep adding risk into the system without it LITERALLY blowing up on you at some point. In terms of the kind of risks I feel are worthwhile to take, this one does not make a whole lot of sense because though individually the risks are small of failure, any one failure is FANTASTICALLY expensive and blows the books. You cannot charge high enough premiums to cover against such Black Swans, and in this case its sufficient to take down an entire civilization, as we see with the kind of poor risk management associated with most financial institutions these days.

I'm more willing to take the smaller risk of powering my cabin with a few solar panels, which generate just about enough electricity to run my laptop and a few lights. I can heat the cabin either with the copious amount of firewood around here, or with some coal from the mine up in Healy. I certainly see no need for an $8.5B dollar Nuke Plant, which will cost me right up front a good $13,000 of my tax money. Crap, for $13,000, I can buy enough solar panels to light up my cabin like a ****ing Christmas Tree!

I do not need a Nuke Plant, and I sure don't need to take the risk that one day we get a big enough tremor to crack the cooling towers. Its lain stupid.

RE

"You cannot keep adding risk into the system without it LITERALLY blowing up on you at some point. In terms of the kind of risks I feel are worthwhile to take, this one does not make a whole lot of sense because though individually the risks are small of failure, any one failure is FANTASTICALLY expensive and blows the books. You cannot charge high enough premiums to cover against such Black Swans, and in this case its sufficient to take down an entire civilization, as we see with the kind of poor risk management associated with most financial institutions these days."

Could you please explain why you think the risks are small of failure - citing an example like OTC derivatives etc?

Sounds to me like you are prepared for a complete collapse of our system as we know it.

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Could you please explain why you think the risks are small of failure - citing an example like OTC derivatives etc?

Far as Nukes go, they have been running pretty well for the last 40 years or so with only a few notable failures like 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. On this basis you can say they have a decent track record with low risk of failure. However, decomissioning costs haven't been realized yet, and numerous of the old reactors are at the end of their design life. This is a guaranteed form of failure of course. So also is all the spent fuel rods nobody wants in their backyard, except of course the Chinese who work hard as they can to find every means possible to turn the Asian continent into a sewer.

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Sounds to me like you are prepared for a complete collapse of our system as we know it.

I just hedge my bets.

RE

Gotcha - wasn't sure exactly what you were talking about.

Thanks