Tag: fuel

politics

Gasoline is an addiction

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The first gas crisis happened before I was born but cars today are less fuel efficient than they were in the 70’s. I usually try not to curse on my blog but seriously what the fuck?! We as a nation have done a lot of amazing things: put a man on the moon with less computer memory (64k) than is in your current mobile phone, invented the Internet, sequenced the human genome – I can go on and on – but some how a fuel efficient car escapes us. Seriously?
Ten years ago in 1998, I lived in England and gas was the equivalent of $8 a gallon. Some of my classmates had cars and their response wasn’t a huge public outcry. They simply made sure that they bought smaller, more fuel efficient cars! Whoa. A mind shattering idea, right? Since i got back, I have been in the minority in believing that gas should cost more that it does now. I had a car from 1999 – 2000 and felt that way when I was paying $1.20 a gallon even though I was a poor college student. I am not Casandra but the handwriting on this wall was pretty clear to me then and it still is now: the problem we have isn’t with the price of gas. The problem is gas, period.
As Thomas Friedman puts it in his recent op-ed piece, “When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up.His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.
To that I say “Amen!” I wrote about this topic in 2005 and so did Mr. Friedman but 3 years later we are still in the same stupid place: buying oil from dictators and/or Russia with no better plan in place. What a lovely situation to be in.
Sure, you may say that as a walker, subway and train rider and cab passenger living in Manhattan I never have known what it was like to own and operate a car. Well, I just joined the car class – I have an 09 Matrix that gets 21 city and 29 highway which still isn’t good enough for me but unfortunately, a hybrid is super expensive and leasing one really isn’t an option.
To be honest, I wish I was paying $6 – $8 a gallon for gas as it would be better for the planet that my daughter is inheriting from me one day.

science

Salt Water As Fuel?

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When John Kanzius of Erie, PA man announced he’d ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he’d invented, some thought it was a hoax. Not only is it not a hoax, scientists know why burns the way it does and he has been able to keep salt water in a test tube burning like a candle, as long as it is exposed to radio frequencies.
This leads me to think that the (to use the pun you know is coming) burning question is how can we use the world’s most abundant substance as clean fuel? Or, more importantly, as my friend and former WGTCTIP2 author Erik puts it, “Does it take more energy to run the necessary storage equipment than the process generates?”
To continue, Erik wants to know why the article does not mention the obvious:

“Hydrogen fuel cells are totally possible, but the one hang-up is the current effort and cost to generate pure hydrogen needed to fuel them. Right now you’d need to capture it from a fossil fuel burning reaction, which obviously isn’t ideal, and then store it at a gas station for people to fill up, making it a huge infrastructure challenge as well. With this machine, instead of burning the released hydrogen, capture it. We could all one day have these in our garages and use them to fuel our cars ourselves.”

Below is a clip from the local news about this cancer fighter who accidentally lit salt water on fire and maybe in the process has saved mankind:

Via Neu