Please realize I'm partially joking

[pc486]

President Bush declared a state of emergency on Saturday of the hurricane strike at the request of Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco under 42 USC 5121-5206. This means the US National Gaurd can be called out to help by the state governor or by the President. However, relief directed primarily under FEMA was not effectivly issued until much later in the week. Heck, the city wasn't secure until the following Saturday evening (the video of the armed forces and busses was awesome though).

I also totally disagree that our armed forces, and espcially the National Gaurd, do not exist to protect US citizens under non-fire conditions. Please also recall that the National Gaurd is not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act.

IMHO, President Bush and Congress are only partly to blame but they still have their slice of the cake. Hopefully things will get fixed as soon as the investigation is completed.

To whomever reads this post: IANAL. I could be talking out of my ass for all that you know. Go look this stuff up and become educated!

[Rileyrat]

[quote="pc486";p="540979"]Hydrogen isn't a bad idea and I would love to drive a hydrogen car but there's the chicken and the egg problem with that. Just where are you going to find hydrogen fuel stations? There's not many I'll tell you that. Even if there are some in your area, what about traveling?[/quote]

How many petrol stations were there before the IC engine became useful? While there are not many hydrogen stations as of yet, they are spreding.

[quote="pc486";p="540979"]Electric cars are very neat and electric motors are awesome with thier broad torque curve. The problem is that large-store battery technology is not sufficient and has not been progressing much in the past years. In order to make pure electric vehicles reality there needs to be better batteries and/or the dumping of all the crap people want in their cars like GPS navigation, nice sound systems, DVD players, air conditioning, and road noise supression. If the car isn't heavy or power hungry then electric vehicles are viable for a short range commuter.[/quote]

The majority of battery tech for powering something like a car comes from the electric r/c car world, thats why it's growth has been slow. To make a car accellerate quickly you have to dump the power quickly, pretty simple idea. The bigger problem is in how much power we can store. The average run for a battery pack on an r/c is about 7-10min, a far cry from what we will need. You can charge even a large cell in about 30min but that reduces it's life expectancy, so we'll need improvement in charging speed and charge life to make electric cars a possibility. Then we'll have to make a no emission power grid. Just because a handful of electric cars will help the enviroment, once you put all cars on the power grid for charging the emmisions that used to be expelled by the cars is being expelled by the power plant.


[quote="The Cid";p="541082"]Useful hydrogen? Like the kind that could fuel one of these prototype cars? Yes. Having a lot of trouble.[/quote]
Did you know you get it when charging certain kinds a batteries? There is a working hydrogen car model available these days that you can assymble in a few minutes. I has an old school solar panel, small motor, water tank, hydrogen tank. You fill up the water tank and the solar panel converts it to hydrogen. Then it is used to propel the car, returns the "waste" water back to the water tank to restart the system. Not the most efficient method but the same can be said about the first combustion motors. The biggest problem is what MB said, takes more energy to make hydrogen right now than the hydrogen produces when it is used.

Posted Tue Sep 06, 2005 8:55 pm:

[quote="pc486";p="541315"]I also totally disagree that our armed forces, and espcially the National Gaurd, do not exist to protect US citizens under non-fire conditions. Please also recall that the National Gaurd is not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act.[/quote]
The majority of the National Guard is comprised of what the military calls combat units. The NG has been hit harder than the federal reserve soldiers as far as deploying to other countries. The LA NG was in Iraq, the majority of NG in LA are from another state. For the president to call on an NG unit they have to first make them into Title 10 or federal units, this takes time. Then you have to issue a federal order for these units you just called up to go someplace. It was reported that the Texas NG was "ready to deploy", this was a stretching of the truth by the media, or an all out misunderstanding. They had been put on alert, this is what happens before what I already said happens, happens. The majority of people think that because the NG tends to be used for stuff like this that you can clap your hands and they will appear, the time frame it was done in was astounding from a military perspective. Mostly it was achieved because they skipped the normal training that would have been given before hand. They aren't just cleaning up a natural disaster, they are also expected to support the population that refused to leave and help local law enforcement.

I have been through this little dance three times myself. Of all three times I was activated (airport security, forrest fire, airforce law enforcement support), The quickest we ever made it from beggining to end(airport security) was 1.5 weeks. They used a little trickery to get it done that fast. They didn't call us to full Title 10 via loop hole, we never left the state. Also the police that were put in place gave us what is called on the job training so there was only one day of briefing, we were not allowed to fire unless given direct guidence from the police or a firearm or explosive was used. The longest one (Air Force security support) took us nearly 2 months from beginning to end.

[quote="pc486";p="541315"]IMHO, President Bush and Congress are only partly to blame but they still have their slice of the cake. Hopefully things will get fixed as soon as the investigation is completed.

To whomever reads this post: IANAL. I could be talking out of my ass for all that you know. Go look this stuff up and become educated![/quote]

Most of your information to reach this idea has to be biased, nearly none of the public really understands what it takes to get a combat unit ready to do a mission such as this. Right now, you have untrained and probably armed soldiers on the streets. This is a powderkeg all because everyone is following the news reporters in saying "It's all Pres. Bush's fault for not getting off his ass." or something simmular.

[Martin Blank]

One-third of the Louisiana National Guard is in Iraq (though they're in the process of deploying home at this moment). The promise is that no state will have to give up more than half of its National Guard troops at any given point.

I have to agree with the president when he says that right now is not the time for finger-pointing. Plenty of time later (in a week or two) to start that. Still, I'm going to toss out a couple of threads to discuss possible ways of avoiding this in the future.

I thought it was also interesting that a number of people in Mississippi communities that were leveled have been looking to the west incredulously and pointing out that Mississippi wasn't tearing itself apart, even though they're in poor communities, so why did New Orleans feel the need to do so?

[Rileyrat]

Probably because Mississippi is generally a small town, good natured kinda poor community where as New Orleans is a pretty rough city. There are bigger but they have a high violent crime rate.

[Deacon]

Most would point out the difference in prevailing morality. One one hand you have primarily rural and urbanized country folk. While they have thier shortcomings like everyone else, it seems that hospitality, civility, and a spirit of neighborly friendliness (or at least personal restraint) is more than can be said for the moral cess pit that is New Orleans. You can talk about it's charm and its history and everything till you eventually run out of words, and all you'll be left with is the nasty reality of people with no inherent belief in anything other than Look Out For Number One. I'd like to point out that while many people's first reaction is yeah, just another bunch of black people with their true color shining through (with sighs and rolled eyes), Mississippi isn't exactly short on blacks either, and you still don't hear of this kind of thing happening over there. I think what we saw in NOLA is a societal microcosm, and it's a shame that it won't be properly studied and analyzed.

[workmad3]

[quote="Rileyrat";p="541318"][quote="pc486";p="540979"]

[quote="The Cid";p="541082"]Useful hydrogen? Like the kind that could fuel one of these prototype cars? Yes. Having a lot of trouble.[/quote]
Did you know you get it when charging certain kinds a batteries? There is a working hydrogen car model available these days that you can assymble in a few minutes. I has an old school solar panel, small motor, water tank, hydrogen tank. You fill up the water tank and the solar panel converts it to hydrogen. Then it is used to propel the car, returns the "waste" water back to the water tank to restart the system. Not the most efficient method but the same can be said about the first combustion motors. The biggest problem is what MB said, takes more energy to make hydrogen right now than the hydrogen produces when it is used.
[/quote][/quote]

One of the easiest methods of producing hydrogen is by electrolysis (running an electric current through water) which splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The discovered in the 19th centruy that you could do this in reverse (combine hydrogen and oxygen) to create electricity. It is an exothermic reaction, I believe, so some heat is produced while doing this, making the process about 80% efficient. This is always the case, and it is quite a bit better than the IC engine. By strapping a solar panel, a water tank and an oxygen tank onto a car, you can essentially have an electric car that recharges its own batteries by continually using power from the solar panel to split the water and then recombine them to charge the batteries.

Only problem with this? you might as well use the solar panel to recharge the batteries, as doing the electrolysis wastes about 20% of the power.

On another note, from some internet sources(I don't know how reliable they are) say the current American roadmap to introducing hydrogen cars may be fairly useless at reducing pollution, as the big oil companies etc want to use hydrogen obtained from cracking hydrocarbons (read petrol) rather than from other sources such as electrolysis reactions.

[naval_aviator_2040]

[quote="pc486";p="540810"]
FYI, it is much easier to push diesel fuel than hydrogen or fuel cell technology for a Right Now solution. Diesel engines are extreemly well understood (it's over a 100 years old) and they are very versitile in fuel acceptance. You can mix regular diesel with biodiesel or use just biodiesel. Other fuels can be burned too like plain vegetable oil if the engine is preheated (run on biodiesel then switch while running). Some drawbacks of moving to diesel is the pollution problem remains and there isn't enough biomass to convert completly away from fossil fuel based diesel. However, they are a good stop-gap sollution and could last a long while if diesel-electric hybrids are built. Also take note that with recent price hikes biodiesel has become cheaper than fossil fuel diesel so fuel prices can be stabilized or reversed.
.[/quote]

another bio-diesel fan on the forums? and i thought i was alone.

[workmad3]

Hydrogen fuel cells are just as extremely well understood. They have been able to get the electricity from a hydrogen fuel cell for 150 years (the particular reaction was discovered in 1838 i think, although not sure). The thing they are really pushing for is not the technology to make cars run off hydrogen(which is basically an electric car principle) but the technology to store the hydrogen, and cost effective ways to obtain it. If they push for another fossil fuel based solution as a stopgap, then the problem will continue or much longer, especially as currently we are running low on the oil and other non-replenishible stores. Seeing as these are used in so many other ares than just fuel, if we can remove the need for them as fuel we will conserve them for other uses for much longer.

[Deacon]

[quote="workmad3";p="541534"]we are running low on the oil and other non-replenishible stores.[/quote]
Quoted for the morbidly amusing conviction of the ignorant.

[workmad3]

So by that deacon, I take it you think that crude oil and natural gas are in no way being used up, that the current supplies will last forever, and that there is no point looking at alternatives because there is no need?

One of the reasons oil prices go up is because the more that is pumped out of the ground, the harder it is to get more up. If we hit the point that it gets too expensive to pump oil up for everyday use, then the world as a whole is essentially screwed. So in that sense we are running out of oil, as well as running out of time.

Yes it is a slightly morbid view. But as the old saying goes 'ignorance is bliss', and note that im not exactly blissful

[Bigity]

There is plenty of oil around still. You are reading some biased reports. However, it's never really bad to look at alternatives, even if they do nothing but decrease the demand for oil enough to make gas cheap again.

Alot of things have to fall into place though to make an alternate fuel source cheaper then gas though. That includes the car makers, oil companies, consumers, etc.

Can't just happen in a few years. Or even several.

[Deacon]

[quote="workmad3";p="541554"]So by that deacon, I take it you think that crude oil and natural gas are in no way being used up, that the current supplies will last forever, and that there is no point looking at alternatives because there is no need?[/quote]
That's quite different than
[quote="workmad3";p="541534"]we are running low on the oil[/quote]

One of the reasons oil prices go up is because the more that is pumped out of the ground, the harder it is to get more up.

Yes, oil is $70/barrel because it's just too expensive to pump it anymore, and there aren't any other massive oil sources out there.

[The Cid]

I would have to wonder what kind of disaster it takes for us to open up our Alaskan Oil Reserve.

You'd think that losing a quarter of our domestic output (if not more), coupled with being at odds with the majority of other oil-producing nations, would be enough.

It's not.

So really, what series of events has to happen for us to free up that oil?!

[pc486]

[quote="Rileyrat";p="541318"]How many petrol stations were there before the IC engine became useful? While there are not many hydrogen stations as of yet, they are spreding.[/quote]
I'm just pointing out that right now hydrogen is not a usable fuel for the masses at this moment. There needs to be government support and/or rapid adoption, like when cars first became popular, to get a sufficient amount of hydrogen stations. Thankfully Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken some initiative and is pushing hydrogen vehicles in my state.

The majority of battery tech for powering something like a car comes from the electric r/c car world, thats why it's growth has been slow. To make a car accellerate quickly you have to dump the power quickly, pretty simple idea. The bigger problem is in how much power we can store. The average run for a battery pack on an r/c is about 7-10min, a far cry from what we will need. You can charge even a large cell in about 30min but that reduces it's life expectancy, so we'll need improvement in charging speed and charge life to make electric cars a possibility. Then we'll have to make a no emission power grid. Just because a handful of electric cars will help the enviroment, once you put all cars on the power grid for charging the emmisions that used to be expelled by the cars is being expelled by the power plant.

You're right on the money. However, even though most electric power in the US is produced using polluting methods like Coal and gas it is more efficient and also easier to control. I'd rather have a few thousand power plants to convert to cleaner energy than a few hundred million cars .

[quote="workmad3";p="541534"]Hydrogen fuel cells are just as extremely well understood. They have been able to get the electricity from a hydrogen fuel cell for 150 years (the particular reaction was discovered in 1838 i think, although not sure). The thing they are really pushing for is not the technology to make cars run off hydrogen(which is basically an electric car principle) but the technology to store the hydrogen, and cost effective ways to obtain it. If they push for another fossil fuel based solution as a stopgap, then the problem will continue or much longer, especially as currently we are running low on the oil and other non-replenishible stores. Seeing as these are used in so many other ares than just fuel, if we can remove the need for them as fuel we will conserve them for other uses for much longer.[/quote]
The problem with fuel cell technology is that the cells, which are expensive, do not last very long because they break down. Luckily there is tons of good research going on to extend the life, like "dry" cell technology. Unfortunately these advanced fuel cells are still in the lab and are nowhere near production ready. I bet in a few decades at most they will be, especially if a considerable amount of research money if released through orginizations like the NSF.

And yes, if we push another fossil fuel then we are heading towards more problems down the road. That's why I like diesel engines since they can transistion smoothly from a fossil fuel to a non-fossil fuel.

[quote="Bigity";p="541562"]There is plenty of oil around still. You are reading some biased reports. However, it's never really bad to look at alternatives, even if they do nothing but decrease the demand for oil enough to make gas cheap again.[/quote]
Plenty of oil? Oh, I'm not too sure about that. One of the biggest remaining un-taped oil resource in the United States is the reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The USGS's mean estimate is 10.4 billion barrels with a mean recoverable of 7.7 billion barrels, and that's not econolically revcoverable but technologically recoverable. While several billion barrels of oil sounds like a big number it really isn't. The US consumes approximatly 20 million barrels of oil a day. That's about 1 year and 5 months of oil in Alasaka provided we suck out 10.4 billion barrels out and do not export any of it. Heck, according to a 2002 DoE report, oil production in that area only can reach 800 thousand barrels a day by 2020 which will reduce foriegn oil dependence from 62% to 60%. That's not what I would call stellar performace or a large oil reserve.

I have two large non-enviornmental problems with oil. The first is the cost. Right now oil isn't exactly expensive but it isn't exactly cheap and I do not see it getting cheaper anytime soon. There are plenty of cheaper alternatives for vehicles that we can move toward. The second is we need to save that oil for a long as possible because there are things that need oil. What about airplanes? You can't just plug in some electric engine and fly 300 people from New York to Heathrow. Most of our plastics are oil based as well. I'm not sure about you guys but I'd like to keep using plastic for some time to come.


On the National Guard point, I see a major problem in a week or more mobilization time for domstic issues. I'm not saying it is easy to mobilize the National Guard or any other military branch but for first response it should be much quicker.

[Deacon]

I certainly hope you're not one of the people who think the military budget should be cut off at the knees, then. Regardless, you like the idea of having a federal government being able--even expected--to send military forces in as its whim?