Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Why renewables are the answer to the high costs of fuel.

Everyone knows that gasoline is expensive all over the world. Exxon Mobile makes gigantic profits year after year and there is nothing to stop them. This is because they have a near-perfect monopoly on oil sales throughout the entire world. There is no incentive for them to lower their prices because it will decrease their profit and that is not what a rational company does. Being rational and being benevolent are completely different.

There is a simple solution to this problem. It has been done before too, and it worked. Early 1900s, Standard Oil owned more than 90% of the world's oil reserves making Rockefeller the richest man in the history of the world. He had no reason to decrease the prices because there was no competition and he created the market price. In the 1940s the US government decided that Standard Oil had to be divided, and the prices went down because every company had to take the market price determined by supply and demand.

There are solutions, and they are being taken after being put aside for at least a decade. The US government is funding more research into renewable energies to make them efficient, which will make them viable competitors to internal-combustion engines.

First, the idea of drilling in the arctic is a short term solution. What do we do when the oil there is depleted? We have to move somewhere else and spend more money moving equipment to other places and more research. An extremely short-term and inefficient solution to the oil crisis.

So, the US government funds scientists and they work hard over the next ten years making fuel cells extremely efficient. We need to make sure that the fuel cells have hydrogen to run. The solution to this is simple. Water is a common resource, hydrogen is a limited resource. What we need to invest in is a way to use nuclear fission to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water atoms and then put them into cars. We put the hydrogen into the cars and you drive off. Simple. The argument that hydrogen is flammmable is true, but not viable because gasoline is also viable. Light a spark next to gasoline and it will start combustion at an uncontrollable rate. Hydrogen may not be stable like water, but neither is gasoline. Nothing in terms of safety will change, and the transportation of hydrogen is silly because we will produce it on-site, which makes it better than gasoline.

Now, who will provide the converters? Companies of course! There will be many companies eventually and people will purchase them, there will be competition, and it will work.

Another thing is, what about the desert? If we can make hydrogen out of water, we can make it out of any thing in the Universe. We just need to improve nuclear fission.

There's the answer to the energy crisis. In essence, it is water.

I don't claim these as my ideas. I am merely putting together ideas from many places.

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