SOLUTIONS! - Why This Book

THE PURPOSE AND ORIGIN AND OF THIS BOOK

The purpose is to propose an effective new fuel/energy system to replace the existing petroleum based system with one that does not use fossil fuels. The benefits of such a system are many, varied and have far reaching positive possibilities including immeasurable economic and political benefits for any country that adopts such a system and environmental benefits for the entire world. I hope the US will be the first to do so.

I am a writer. Much of my writing has been political and, as such, I seem to be far too conservative for my liberal family and friends and far too liberal for those on the conservative side. Just where does that put me? I am certainly rarely neutral about anything. Much of my writing in the past has reflected my disgust and indignation at self serving politicians, celebrities, media personalities and other Hollywood types– people of all persuasions who sorely abuse the bully pulpit their celebrity provides. I frequently cringe at the misstatements of these self righteous individuals from many different persuasions in comments on and in all of the media. Real wisdom seems to be an extreme rarity these days, while lies, name calling and hate speech have become so common as to be considered normal.

I have found that this exercising of my own emotional bias is nothing but jousting at windmills. It provides mental exercise, but to what end and at what cost? So, recently I have taken a new mental tack and that new tack is directed toward finding real, viable solutions to the many problems we face– not just grousing about them and blaming others. There’s enough of that going on already in our political scene and in our media. The loud and constant drum of accusations and blame– always of others– is a thunderous roar in comparison to those very few voices that actually propose real solutions.

The powerful voices of the legal profession are almost universally raised in condemnation and blame, never in creative solutions. That, of course, is their main purpose– blaming or defending others from blame. The media universally reports and decides what to report based on how bad it is. Very few constructive efforts– positive pictures– get media attention. Their appeal is to the accident gawker in each of us– that powerful force that causes us to crane our necks when passing an accident scene, fight or other mayhem we may be near. Pain and suffering, misery and destruction, murder and divorce battles– especially involving any celebrity– are the life blood of the news media. Warm fuzzies are just not their thing except on extremely rare occasions.

Lawyers and the media deal almost exclusively with the past– with precedent. They have little view of any possible future in comparison with the impact they might have on that future and much of that impact is emotional– the feelings and passions of life. In contrast, scientists and engineers deal almost exclusively with the future– in the development of new ideas, theories and technology that mostly impact the realities of life. There is of course some emotional effects and realities in what they do, but mostly that is interpreted for the public by– guess who– lawyers and the media.

What we need to do to work toward real solutions to problems is to counter this constant thunder of misery and the berating of virtually everything and start talking about solutions. I am now attempting to do this as much as practical in my writing– in making my points and especially in describing my solutions.

One of the problems with turning this around is that destruction is far far easier and requires much less effort, organization, intelligence and dog work than construction. Many old maxims declare how it is so much simpler to destroy than to build. War or mob action using a very few people with limited abilities can destroy in minutes what it has taken thousands of hard working and brilliant people years to accomplish. The twin towers on 9/11 are a graphic example of that. There are an infinite number of others from WW-II to a small child destroying the toy of another because he couldn’t have one. Most parents have witnessed this last small type of mayhem in their own children.

That being said, I shall now deal with the positive and provide real workable solutions to this very serious problem that certainly will not go away on its own.

The origin: My very first independent research into the overall energy industry was in 1954 when I was involved in attaining my Professional Engineering status. Part of what we did as a group involved predictions about the future of petroleum. We did considerable literature searching and other research on the oil industry and wrote a detailed report including predictions for the next fifty years. When I once again delved into the petroleum industry with my independent research on energy alternatives in 1998 I was searching for a practical alternative to the present system. I soon became aware of the work being done on the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle and started pursuing information about this new idea.

It wasn’t long before I realized that such an undertaking had many obstacles to overcome before it could become a practical reality. As I studied and recognized what had to be done, particularly the required infrastructure that would be totally new and very expensive, I began to look for simpler, less expensive alternatives. I believe the system I came up with and have outlined in this book to be far better that the hydrogen fuel-cell system in virtually every aspect. This system will be:

1. Relatively inexpensive to utilize
2. Quite simple to implement
3. Adaptable to and can use most of the infrastructure already in place
4. Based on raw materials we already have or can be developed here
5. Applicable to existing vehicles with relatively minor upgrading
6. Applicable to existing IC engines of all type with minor upgrading
7. Developed using existing, evolving technology
8. A net zero contributor of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
9. An evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary change - a good start to becoming a constantly improving, adapting system driving a growing and improving technology.

While the main thrust of such a system is to provide a new, better, less expensive and less environmentally intrusive system for energy and transportation, there are many benefits other than just getting away from fossil fuels. These include positive effects to four of the first seven of the top twenty-two “most serious concerns of the American public” as shown in a public survey conducted by MIT and cited later in this book

Nbr 1 Terrorism - cut off the billions in oil money now going to so many despotic regimes and into funding of terrorism, chiefly to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and their fangs would be effectively pulled

Nbr 3 The Economy - An American fuel industry would be an enormous boon to our economy if it only shut off the hemorrhaging of oil money

Nbr 4 Unemployment - thousands of new jobs would be created right here.

Nbr 7 Federal Budget deficit - profits from this new industry would pour billions into the federal treasury - money now going out overseas

Nbr 13 The Environment - may be far down the list, but net carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly reduced if not eliminated

The attention given to a new fuel system prompted effort into other, seemingly unconnected areas. It has been amazing to me to discover that so many of our serious problems are interrelated and how finding one solution often leads to another– almost totally unrelated problem and so to the demand for another workable system. Several other of these new answers to old problems are included near the end of this book.

Before starting the main section of the book, I urge you to read the two small sections following this purpose description. They will provide you with an understanding of what any new system or concept faces in the real world, namely, resistance to any change from a lot of deeply entrenched people and organizations. The first is An Open Letter to Everyone in the US. It will show some of my political biases, but mostly it will describe he immense difficulty of getting anything really new and effective done in the face of such powerful deeply entrenched self-interests as politicians and the media. It also deals with the problem of any idea even being heard among the clamor of celebrity no matter how good or important that idea might be.

The second section titled, Simple Isn’t Always so Simple describes why simple solutions are often by-passed in favor of far more expensive and complicated ones. This is particularly true in the political arena where emotions and emotional appeals play a far bigger role than logic or logical appeals in deciding which idea or concept to push and which one to ignore.

Though these two sections deal with subjects far from the real world of fuel and energy, they do deal with forces that can make a new idea work or relegate it to the ash-can of history. They describe real difficulties and obstacles that must be dealt with and overcome in order for any new system to become a reality now matter how good and effective that system might be. Indeed, the battle to get it noticed and make it a reality may require more effort than implementation of the idea or system itself. The process, once begun, may take completely unexpected twists and turns in moving, sometimes forward and sometimes back, but always in the ultimate direction of successful implementation.

Our space program and its, “Put a Man on the Moon” goal followed just such a wandering path en route to its success. We can expect no less from our efforts to find a new fuel/energy system which certainly has a more powerful practical and obviously profitable goal.
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An Open Letter to Everyone in the US

I really have nothing against members of the legal profession or the media per se. They are professionals who have a powerful effect on us all – a necessary force that moves and motivates all of us in varying degrees. I guess it’s just the adversarial way the legal profession is trained to look at any situation. They seem to be trained to concentrate on one side of an issue, ignoring anything and everything that doesn’t further their chosen position. This one sidedness promotes a very narrow viewpoint as all things are depicted as either right or wrong– black or white– and that’s quite unrealistic– not at all the way the real world works.

How about the profession of journalism? Consider the concentration on negativity, pain, suffering and mayhem that is the bulk of the contribution of the media. Is it really necessary to spend so much effort on serving up so great a preponderance of pain, suffering, and sensationalism about sex and celebrity than anything of substance having real value. Is it really necessary to hit us with daily doses of the foibles and adolescent antics of the likes of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise or Anna Nicole Smith?

I am trained in a profession as far removed from these concept as possible, engineering. The professional training of engineers is such that issues are usually viewed in measured ways, pragmatically, factually, and with as little emotional bias as possible. Of course, that’s the ideal that many fall short of, but we usually try to put emotions aside and make judgements based on the facts at hand. After all emotions mean nothing to the workings of an electronic network, the strength of a tall building or the operation of an aircraft engine. It was pure human emotion that brought these three factors together in such a tragic way on 9/11.

Political correctness is certainly not one of engineering’s axioms or guiding principles. A bridge built with politically correct axioms would most likely fail before it opened. In engineering design one must adhere strictly to factual knowledge from whatever source, right or left, conservative or liberal. Gravity, for example, is totally apolitical. Apply political rules to any situation where gravity is a factor and disaster will surely follow. It seems to me this might hold just as true for social situations.

Safety factor is an important part of any engineering project. If you use a steel beam that is three times as strong as calculations indicate you are probably using a high factor of safety in a conservative design. If you use one in the same instance that is just 20% stronger, the factor is quite low. The result would be the opposite of conservative– liberal, radical, or really risky. Many engineering failures have been cause by too low a factor of safety by a designer who may have missed, ignored, or just disliked some of the facts. Engineering failures can be catastrophic as witness the bridge over the Tacoma narrows. Galloping Gertie may be the most famous engineering failure of all time. Certainly there are few Americans who haven’t viewed the collapse on TV. Clearly, the designers missed (or ignored) the harmonic stress, high winds soon placed on the structure. This stress clearly overwhelmed whatever factor of safety was used in the design. The results of engineering failures are not always so dramatic, but they cost lives and property damage every year making the error evident and frequently making the designer pay.

Political and social failures are not nearly so easy to identify, particularly early on. Eventually they catch up with people, but even then identifying such failures is not an easy task. The typical idealistic plan that is estimated to cost a billion dollars and solve a problem usually costs ten billion, barely makes a dent in the original problem and may lead to other even more costly projects to correct the errors in the first one. Every political party, group or politician has committed these types of errors in the past– or were they really errors? All the money spent on the project still ended up in someone’s bank account. Hmmmm! Politicians and other government types are very good at hiding this from the public and at blaming others for the mistakes they make. Sadly, this has become so much the case that most pundits on viewing a cost projection of any political project, will automatically multiply the projected cost by a factor of ten.

Forty years of “let the government do it” mania in our country has created a monster that now consumes about 40% of our gross national product. Our education system, once the best in the world has slipped so far from its once lofty position because of a lowest common denominator philosophy linked with a don’t ever hurt the little darlings self esteem dominant attitude. We are now producing masses of drop outs and even graduates that can hardly read a sentence or add a column of figures. Our high school graduates understand less of science and engineering than do many Chinese or Indian fifth graders. We now spend far more per student on education than any other nation, yet our graduates average mediocre at best compared with many, even some of those in impoverished nations.

The foundation on which our nation has stood for years, the nuclear family, has been decimated by low morality. Even our ex-President, “I never had sex with that woman.” lies and cheats openly, defying the truth in virtual immunity from any media condemnation. His wife, now the senator from New York, spends great gobs of taxpayer money on a lavish palace she calls her office and says, “It is to better serve the people.” In her speeches, she only uses the truth on those rare occasions when it fits her agenda. Her, “I just can’t recalls” are legendary. Of course, that description fits many politicians I know of. This is a truly sorry state of affairs.

Those same big government proponents have built an IRS code so complex it needs an army of attorneys and accountants to serve the private sector simply because of its complexities. It provides a huge financial windfall to tax attorneys and accountants. It has so many loopholes and tax dodges that the wealthiest people can hire those tax attorneys and accountants who often help them to avoid taxes altogether. In my proposed new tax code I describe a taxing system that is simple, fair, effective, workable and enforceable. Naturally, the members of congress wouldn’t consider it since it is simple, fair, effective, workable and enforceable. Not only that, but it separates Congress from lots of their present self-serving options while keeping their hands out of the pot.

I read recently where a man received a grant of $50,000 from the federal government to study some strange and remote recycling process and write a book on it. Not only did he get the $50,000, but now he receives income from several universities to help in his project. Apparently he will continue to receive money until he writes the book. He has been on the project for about three years and may not complete it for years. The longer it continues, the longer he gets paid for “trying.” I wish I could get away with that.

Why not let loose college varsity teams of scientists and engineers– think teams– to compete in finding solutions to these kinds of projects. An annual science and engineering competition between universities on a scale of the current sports competition with the associated press coverage would do wonders for university science and engineering departments, not to mention our nation. Then, in addition to spotlights on prima donna sports personalities who do nothing but entertain, you would have college “thinkeletes” being praised and admired. Consider, how many top professional scientists or engineers can you name compared to the number of sports greats that are almost household names? I’ll wager the average American can’t name a single scientist or engineer compared to literally hundreds of sports personalities. Even more ridiculous is the media coverage of the antics of the latest “prostibimbos” like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith? Our media serves up and their public demands, more sensationalism about sex and celebrity than anything of substance having real value. I wonder which of those is the chicken and which the egg?

I have several real, practical solutions to some of the most vexing problems facing America today. These are problems far bigger than any alternative recycling process will ever solve. Included is a real, practical solution to recycling of everything manufactured. I’d certainly like to receive a grant of $50,000 to further study those problems and I can promise a comprehensive interim report of progress at least once a year. Please realize, I look at problems like an engineer, not a politician or a professional grant hunter and certainly not like an entertainment personality. That means real, workable solutions within finite amounts of time, not “pie in the sky” proposals with endless, fruitless and expensive “studies” driven by and supported with emotional appeals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not adverse to study grants, or entertainment for that matter. I just lack respect for those who consider them worthwhile ends rather than means or titillation.

One example of profitable effort on a really major problem is given in an email exchange with an organization that is promoting the so-called “hydrogen economy” - the use of free hydrogen in fuel-cell powered vehicles. I am including the exchange with this organization as the example. While I am not questioning the purity of the motives of this group, I am questioning their concentration on only one part [the fuel-cell vehicle] of a very complex and much larger system. Also included is an exchange with fellow members of an International writers group, many of whom are scientists of some note. My concern is that much money is being spent on the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle with little consideration of the whole picture of the entire system.
As I see it, politicians who get involved in these types of things mostly do so as a self promotion effort. They are far more likely to look at it as an opportunity to buy votes with taxpayer dollars by sponsoring massive “pork barrel” projects than as any project to benefit the country. While the champion promoter of pork barrel projects seems to be Ted Kennedy (the big dig), Robert Byrd (ex KKK) is close behind. Long time control of many districts, often controlled by powerful Democrat machines like the one in Cook County, Illinois, or Boston, is maintained by massive vote buying efforts in addition to pork barrel projects. Somehow, money from taxpayers manages to filter into the works of these political machines and then into the pockets of many loyal members. For this reason, Republicans gain more of my support than Democrats. The Democrats’ long tenure in power has enabled them to develop these virtually invulnerable political machines. Had the Republicans been in control for as long I’m sure they would have built similar machines. They certainly did in the past. I see many, if not most, politicians of both parties as being far more interested in using our tax dollars in self-serving pork-barrel, vote-buying projects to help them get in and stay in office than concerning themselves with the very real problems America faces.

A few words about this writer: I am a very talented, imaginative person who has directed his efforts to finding practical, workable solutions for many of our most difficult problems. Lacking fame, political clout, or vast finances, I have little chance to be heard, let alone help with some real progress. I shall continue to browbeat as many politicians and media people who might pick up my message as I can via my writing. Unfortunately all but a very few of my messages receive no response or at most a polite, “We received your message.” Since I am not a violent person, that optional path to notoriety is also out of the question. Nor do I have Anna Nicole Smith’s sex appeal, money or celebrity so the media doesn’t hang on my every word. Should any of my writings gain the attention of the public, then maybe someone would listen.

All those pea brained Hollywood types get their message out no matter how ridiculous or false their premises are. As Tom Friedman says about Americans, “They are obsessed with sex, celebrity and sensationalism.” A Chinese instructional book used in a course for businessmen planning to do business in America puts it even more bluntly by saying, “In dealing with Americans, consider their poor education. Imagine you are dealing with a fourth grader in China.”

When the antics of such totally useless persons as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Anna Nicole Smith vie for the most air time on the TV news, something is definitely out of whack in American TV. Maybe watchers with the mentality of fourteen year old girls are driving TV news - who knows? In any event that is a sad commentary on what is important to Americans or at least what TV producers think is important.

Are the antics of our politicians far from that? I seem to see an amazing similarity. One listen to those man-on-the-street interviews of “average” Americans, so popular with TV and radio talk shows demonstrates the monumental ignorance of most of the public about anything not from the co-joined worlds of entertainment and sports. As one Chinese pundit puts it, “I feel sorry for Americans. They once led the world in virtually everything and now look how ignorant they have become as they continue to fall rapidly in virtually every field.”

Some time within the last ten years a world-changing revolution began, almost unnoticed. Over an incredibly short time that revolution grew from a curiosity– a very small spark, to a mania– a considerable conflagration, and now has become a world changing explosion. This explosion of e-communication, e-commerce, e-learning, e-knowledge, and countless other e-enterprises and e-activities has already conquered most of the world bringing massive and terribly rapid changes. We now live in almost fully fledged e-time, the age of instant access to almost everything by almost everyone, almost everywhere. Anything that can be seen or heard, can be converted to digital information– words, records, photos, graphics, plans, formulae, music, films, video– all can be digitized and sent instantaneously anywhere on the globe. Not only can it be sent anywhere, but it can be answered from anywhere virtually instantaneously. And all this can be done by anyone with access to the Internet. The e-world is now a virtual point– everyplace on the globe is immediately adjacent to every other place as far as information is concerned.

To wit: an engineering firm in New York can, as it closes, hand data to a designer in China, an accountant in India, and a graphics designer in Israel– instantly, at least as easy as taking it to the office next door. The next morning when the office opens, finished drawings from China, complete cost analysis from India, and an advertising layout from Israel are all ready and waiting. The designer in China, the accountant in India, and the graphics artist in Israel are for all intent and purpose, right there in the same office. In addition, the work was done while the members of the engineering firm slept and at about a third of the cost of doing it in house.
I leave you with a final thought: the fall or collapse of a civilization is often quite rapid and most great ones left behind as remnants, huge sports arenas after they fell. It is my opinion that our concentration on sex, celebrity, sensationalism and entertainment rather than things of real substance will soon precipitate a rapid and resounding fall, socially, morally and economically. I see little chance of our recovery because we seem not to have the drive to excellence that was once an American trademark. We’s sooner sit and watch cheap and shallow TV than get involved in any substantive activities. If you doubt my words I suggest you read, “Collapse” by Jared Diamond . If that doesn’t scare you to death, nothing will.
I would be pleased to answer anyone who would care to respond to this letter.

Cordially, Howard Johnson
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SIMPLE ISN’T ALWAYS SO SIMPLE

Simple, easy-to-understand solutions rarely get the media attention the more difficult, hard-to-understand ones do. That seems to be a current law of nature. Maybe that’s because most people think that the more expensive, complex or difficult a thing is the better it is. We know from the field of medicine that is just not always the case. Any drug or natural remedy that is inexpensive or free is rarely “sold” simply because there is so little profit. On the other hand, expensive Rx medicines offer room for substantial profit and so are promoted by expensive advertising campaigns in the media. Indeed there is even a book describing numerous effective and cheap herbal and other non-prescription medications that work as well as or better than expensive prescriptions for the same malady or condition. It seems that we just equate high price with high quality no matter what it may be, and even when the exact opposite is true. Media advertising has much to do with this as their revenue is totally dependent on sales of profitable and usually more costly items to an unsuspecting and intellectually vulnerable public.

Simple, easy-to-understand laws which provide practical and inexpensive solutions to problems will never or certainly rarely pass Congress. This is because simple, easy-to-understand laws might enable the public to know what their representatives are doing and that is the last thing a lot of them want to happen. Attorneys, a substantial and disproportional majority in Congress, are not known for writing or speaking in plain English. Their majority enables them to create complex law in a language which only other attorneys understand so the common folk must hire attorneys to interpret the law for them. The result is a self-serving welfare program for attorneys everywhere. The foxes are indeed living in the henhouse. No wonder US colleges and universities are turning out far more attorneys than scientists or engineers. One solution that would greatly benefit we commoners would be to limit the number of attorneys in all legislatures and judgeships to twenty-five percent. Another would simply be to bar practicing attorneys from membership in any law making body, or as sitting judges until five years after they quit practicing law. Do you see any chance of that happening? Ha!

This booklet contains several examples of possible simple solutions to vexing problems. Solutions which our Congress will likely never ever consider, let alone pass into law until and unless the voting public demands it. This is mainly because the common folk would then understand the law and not have to rely on the legal profession to explain it to them. Heaven help those politicians should the real truth be placed in the hands of the public and that is just what is beginning to happen with the Internet and wireless connectivity. Once the electorate knows and believes what those scoundrels have really been up to, elections would have brand new meaning. The other factor that stands to prevent simple effective solutions being implemented is that this would stop or certainly slow down the hemorrhage of great gobs of money now being spent on inefficient studies and development. Money that often flows into the states or districts of this or that Congressman or Senator to ensure his or her next election.

The IRS tax code is a perfect example of how congress creates increasingly complex law. The tax system proposed in this book is a very practical and realistic solution. It would replace the present complex law with a simple, easily enforceable system of taxation that is infinitely fair. The biggest losers would be those attorneys and accountants who make huge amounts of money interpreting the present IRS code and finding tax loopholes for the benefit of mostly wealthy taxpayers. The inclusion of a negative income tax for the poor would replace and pay for most welfare and Social Security. This is a new kind of tax, easily adjusted to change the amount our government takes away from us. The existing IRS organization would have a far simpler job enforcing this tax system and finding cheaters.

This brings me to HoJo’s first rule about congressional legislation: “No law will pass congress that does not buy votes from a district or group of constituents, pay off a political debt of some influential group, satisfy the need of some lobbyist or labor leader, generate a completely new and expensive bureaucracy (more vote buying) or put more money in the hands of congress either indirectly via grants, necessary expenses, travel and pork barrel projects, or directly into their pockets like pay raises and expensive (to taxpayers) perks.” (Hillary’s Taj Mahal?) This is why good legislation and simple laws and solutions to problems are so rarely seen in the public sector. The incentive is to spend money rather than to get results. That brings me to HoJo’s second rule: “The primary purpose of any congressional action is to keep the individual members of Congress, in Congress primarily by hoodwinking constituents into thinking the action is being taken for or because of them.” Understanding these rules can provide a much more accurate understanding of how and why Congress does as it does.

The so called “drug war,” has completely failed to reduce the continuing crime and damage to society while the illegal drug business has become one of the largest industries in America. A realistic solution is proposed with a revolutionary new concept that would greatly reduce drug crime by taking the profit out of the illegal sales of drugs. Opposition would come from some on moral grounds even though overall morality (and health) would be greatly increased. Those who benefit financially from the “war on drugs” including some politicians would also oppose this practical solution.

The most pressing solution and that which is the central focus of this book came to the author’s notice several years ago. I started studying all the hype about the “Hydrogen Economy” based on hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicles. I soon realized this highly touted system has been receiving far more attention than other systems which are far cheaper, easier to develop, less intrusive, more efficient and do far less environmental damage. We Americans seem to prefer space-age glamour to practicality. One researcher notes, “The fuel cell coalition requests $5.5 billion in funding over the next 10 years to bring fuel cell technology to the U.S. market. That’s a lot of money for a small part of the whole system.” That’s also a lot of money to develop a system, that merely sits between a power source and its use while consuming a substantial amount of that power. Of course, there are lots of hands reaching for the pie based solely on its popularity and mystique. No need to produce a working system, the pie-in-the-sky promise seems enough to loosen the governmental purse strings and send our tax dollars down numerous rat holes. It has happened before and will happen again as long as money is made available based on emotional appeal rather than sound knowledge.

Interest in a solution to our serious energy crisis has been heightened by the growing furor over global warming. Whether or not the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide is a major contributor to global warming has but little to do with what is a real and growing energy crisis. In that fear over global warming activates and energizes serious effort at finding alternatives to petroleum and other fossil fuels it is certainly a positive force. Conservation as extolled by many is but a stop-gap measure, certainly not a reversal, but merely a slight slowing in the growth of atmospheric CO2. Sadly, America’s, even the West’s effort`s at conservation will very soon be overridden by growth of emissions from rapidly expanding economies of China, India, and other developing nations. The only real answer is energy sources from non-fossil fuels for the entire world and we could lead the way.

There are several very workable solutions proposed which address both the high and growing cost of energy and the release of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere along with its possible effect on global warming. Most of these use existing technologies which provide off-the-shelf components that have already proven to be workable. The production of atmospheric carbon dioxide is set to increase dramatically in the next ten years from coal-fired power plants now being constructed all over China, India and the rest of the now rapidly growing economies in the developing world. This growth in energy production will, in the next few years, dwarf the contribution of CO2 now being made by the West. We can’t control that, but a new and portable energy source, if brought into reality here and shared with those developing nations could have a huge beneficial effect on the entire world.

There are several other relatively simple solutions described as practical answers to various problems, most of which would face an uphill battle because of the same kinds of political obstacles to their enactment as already described. Of course, who ever described political activity as rational except as a means of either keeping a politician in office or gaining for him or her power and/or money.

Check out these links to further information about the information in "SOLUTIONS!"

New Vehicle Fuels & fuel alternatives - http://cheapfuels.blogspot.com/
SUPER Hydrogen Energy Economy, The - Overview - http://SUPERfuel.blogspot.com