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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

2009-09-02 15:54:53


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