Tom Brokaw interviewed Al at length this morning. Al is still beating the drum for "alternate energy". Mostly he made those innocous comments about "moving forward" and "thinking outside the box", stuff that contains no real information but sounds good. He now wants the entire economy converted over to solar electric and electric cars. Al said all we need is better electrical transmission lines to move the juice from producer to user. What Al didn't say is that you can only transmit electricity 500 miles before the line losses get so bad that it isn't worth it. Nor did he explain how to heat your house on alternate energy. Nor did explain where the batteries for electric cars are coming from. Current battery technology (lead acid) is only good enough for golf carts. The only difference between a golf car and an electric car is better batteries.
But Al is opposed to oil drilling because only running out of oil will drive Americans to the enlightenment of true greenness. Freezing to death in the dark is very enlightening.
Brokaw asked Al about his lavish energy hog of house, and Al said "I buy electricity from "green" producers and that makes it alright." He also claimed his house uses "geothermal" power which is a stretch, there are no volcanic hotspots in Tennessee. He probably means he has a heat pump working off a heat exchanger buried in the lawn. That's nothing new, I had one in a cheap garden apartment in Mississippi back in the 1960's.
Al again claimed that science is on his side, even though the American Physical Society declared that man made global warming is not scientifically accepted just last week. That means a small majority of physicists think man made global warming is balony, but a sizable minority still believes in it. If the majority were larger, they would have used stronger language to condemn man made global warming. Opinions of physicists counts, global warming is a heat transfer problem, which is squarely in the domain of physics.
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