News about and excerpts from the latest edition of a new book on energy. - Updated September 21, 2007

“A CONVENIENT SOLUTION!”

HOW AMERICANS CAN SOLVE THE ENERGY CRISIS, SAVE OUR ECONOMY, AND HELP REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING IN TEN YEARS.


By Howard Johnson

NOTE: This book should be released by the publisher around the end of February 2008 and be available in bookstores and on the Internet. In the mean time, prepublication copies will be made available to media people who ask for them.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

It is part of a mission I have been on for several years. That mission is to write and speak about practical ways to save us– the US and the world– from the ravages of the petroleum dragon including the pending economic disaster. I will do my utmost to make everyone aware of available options for safe, affordable energy generation and use. I will also try to motivate everyone to demand we adopt these options. The options described in this book are real and practical alternatives to fossil fuels that will:

1) Replace the use of petroleum and coal-based fuels with renewable, non polluting fuels.

2) Build an American energy system that will stop the hemorrhaging of billions of US dollars, mostly to despotic nations that preach our destruction.

3) Build an American energy industry that boosts our economy and provides good jobs for many Americans.

4) Stop the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide and that possible link to global warming.

5) Accomplish most of this within just the next ten years.

This book describes and promotes several effective new fuel/energy systems to replace the existing petroleum-based system with one that does not use fossil fuels. It describes the benefits of such a system, benefits which are many, varied and have far reaching positive attributes. These include immeasurable economic and political benefits for the citizens of any state or country that adopts such a system and environmental benefits for the entire world. There are powerful and deeply entrenched economic and political forces all over the world that would oppose such a system as it would challenge their power and control over energy. I trust our nation will overcome this opposition and lead the world by becoming the first to adopt such a system.

This new book should interest all of you, regardless of your political or social leanings or agenda. It contains a broad range of information about energy, fuels, power generation, their environmental impact, and associated subjects. It also provides some real answers to the basic questions about this important subject. These answers are ready to implement NOW! Not in decades, but maybe even months. Some are even in use as I write.

This Information should give you some idea what is in the book. Starting with the table of contents, it then highlights some significant excerpts from the book.

VERY IMPORTANT: If you are at all concerned with the energy/fuel crisis or the growing emissions of carbon dioxide and its possible impact on global warming, here’s a way to help!

While I will continue to send copies of this book to any interested individual, group or government agency I can find, I desperately need many more people to provide appropriate recipients. Should any reader of this blog want a hard copy of my book please email me at hobarb@yahoo.com . I would also like you to send me information– address, email, etc.– of any media person, celebrity or politician you might know who might be interested in the energy industry or environment, especially anyone with whom you are acquainted and could get to look at my book. It would be doubly helpful if you could write a letter or send an email using your good name. I would even be willing to write the letter for you to send– or at least provide you with a finished package to sign and send. I would certainly give you total control over any type of contact.

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PLEASE NOTE: I have prepared a lecture on the same subject as the book. I propose to give this lecture to any group interested in learning about the economic and environmental benefits the systems described in the book provide. For information about the lecture, goto http://www.hjacslect.blogspot.com/. Information on how to arrange for me to lecture to your group or organization is also available in this blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EXCITING NEWS: The microturbine power system described in the introductory story, “A day in the Life of a Tribrid Car,” has already become a practical reality and is in use. This proven system provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, butanol, natural gas, bio-diesel, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement. With fuel efficiency more than twice that of more conventional piston engines, low maintenance costs, long life, quiet operation, extremely low emissions and many other advantages, this proven power system could easily be the wave of the future and they are already in production and use. This encouraging development is described in the book with more information to be included as it is received from the developers of this proven technology. Don’t gas turbines dominate aircraft propulsion? This could certainly portend the same for ground transportation in the very near future as quantity production and creative development lower costs and improve performance.

MORE GREAT NEWS: PHEVs (Plug in hybrid electric vehicles) and PEVs (Plug in electric vehicles) are now showing greatly increased interest, development and production, mostly by independent entrepreneurs. Thank you creative technical and business people! While the government spends billions on boondogles and reams of research reports, independent entrepreneurs are actually doing something concrete with real vehicles and real systems for energy storage and distribution. NOTE: This is being done with private money and with little or no tax dollars. Several new and exciting concepts have come to this writer's attention recently and are described in the addendum at the end of the book. More information about batteries and EVs has also been added to the body of the book.

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PLEASE NOTE: The name of this book has been changed several times over my years of research and creative effort put into it. When I read Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth” I realized that my book provided the real, concrete answers to important questions he posed and to which he provided no specific answers. I then decided to rename it “A Convenient Solution!” because of the significant answers it provides and of the relations to many of his claims.

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A CONVENIENT SOLUTION! – CONTENTS: (titles may change)

INTRODUCTION AND AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

The Purpose and Background of this Idea and Book
The Hydrogen Economy and the Optimal Energy Economy
This is really about the energy crisis and what we must do about it.
The Optimal Energy Economy - What it is and what it could do
Hydrogen Vehicle Won’t be Viable Soon, Study Says
An Interesting scenario - A day in the Life of a Tribrid© Car
What this scenario could point to
The turbine powered Tribrid© car is here! Well, almost
Off-the-shelf micro-turbines are now ready
Another Scenario of the Future
The Hydrogen Fuel-cell System - lots of hype
Why the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
A New Process - Hydrogen from Aluminum and Water

ALTERNATIVES TO THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY
Alternate Fuels - Fuels for the Future
Renewable or "RN" Fuel: Economic Boon

OVERVIEW OF MODERN ENERGY SYSTEMS
I Fuels
II Fueled power systems
III Electric power plants

THE TRIBRID VEHICLE OR PHEV
Alternatives to the Hydrogen Fuel-cell Vehicle
The RN Fuel/Electric Economy - Results
Power sources for generators in tribrid© vehicles
Types of Engines, their fuels and generators
Summary of Power Devices & Fuel
A Case for a Gradual Transition - Evolutionary
Where will we get the Required RN Fuel?
The problem of Lack of Glamour & Lack of Cost
Summary and a call to Action
References to further reading
Bibliography and list of Internet links to more information

ADDENDUM: Related articles from the Internet and links to their web sites

National Fuel-cell Research Center at UC Irvine to test new, efficient and clean power generation technology
An Investigation of the Feasibility of Coal-based Methanol for Application in Transportation Fuel-cell Systems
GM Volt Concept Car - Press Release
Tesla roadster - From EP to VP
Japan to set up Public/Private EV Program
Fire fly battery - a radically new lead-acid battery
Back from the Dead – The Future of EV powered Cars
The Electric Vehicles of Today and Tomorrow
GM’s Chevy S-10 Electric - Was it cancelled because it was too Good?
NiMH - Nickle/Metal Hydride Batteries - Why are they not being used?
Altair Nanotechnologies Achieves Breakthrough in Battery Materials
A123Systems Receives $40 Million Investment to Expand Product Portfolio and Scale Manufacturing of Hybrid and Plug-In Hybrid Batteries
Nano technology...Why It Could Be the Biggest Payoff Since the Advent of the Steam Engine
Key word: Nano technology, information technology, industrial processes.
The Nano technology Revolution
Ex-Environmental Leaders Tout Nuclear Energy
New Process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy
DMF - high energy liquid fuel from sugar, much like gasoline
Ultra capacitors, Dark Horse in the race to Power Hybrid Cars
Ethanol may not be so good for the environment
GM to road test its latest Chevrolet Volt PHEV
EVs and PEVs - Electric vehicle Specs and Web sites.

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A CONVENIENT SOLUTION! – the book – some significant excerpts:

Title page: Some radical, but practical ideas for designing a system to solve our energy problem by replacing all fossil fuels with renewable fuels. This system, from raw material to fuel in vehicles, would also be a huge economic boon and even help solve some of our vexing environmental problems.

Purpose, Page i: 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.

Page ii: I believe the systems I describe and have outlined in this book to be far better than the hydrogen fuel-cell system in virtually every aspect. These systems will be:

1. Relatively inexpensive to utilize.
2. Far easier, simpler and less expensive to implement than the hydrogen system.
3. Adaptable to and can use most of existing infrastructures.
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.
10. An America-based industry with many substantial benefits, social, political and economic.

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, high paying 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 of public concerns, but net carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly reduced if not eliminated.

It might even be a plus for Nbr 2 Health care. The greatly increased stay-at-home revenue could provide funds for better health care.

Page 5: Purpose - to propose timely, affordable and practical solutions to many components of the energy crisis facing our nation including:

1. The growing consumption and dwindling supply of petroleum based fuels in the entire world. This is aggravated by the now rapidly expanding economies of the huge nations of China and India among many others.

2 The growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its link to global warming.

3 The increasingly dangerous transfer of huge amounts of money from the US (and many other free-world countries) to totalitarian regimes that threaten, indeed promise, our destruction.

Page 5: This section proposes solutions in years, instead of decades, with little infrastructure changes using existing technologies.

In short, adopting these concepts and new technologies will:

1. Almost completely replace fossil fuels, petroleum and coal, for transportation and electrical power.

2. Stop the rapid increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

3. Stem the drastic hemorrhage of money now going mostly to totalitarian nations that vow our destruction.

4. Provide an immense growth in our economy with many high-paying jobs right here in the US. It could very easily be the biggest opportunity for growth in our economy ever and a real answer to many environmental concerns.

Page 9: THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY AND THE OPTIMAL ENERGY ECONOMY
The Optimal Energy Economy is my own name for what is actually the subject of this book. It is the economy that would result from the adoption of the most efficient combination of the systems described herein and other systems yet to be designed and described. The name comes from what I believe to be the heart of any successful system, that being the optimal use and conversion of energy. No matter how you look at it, the entire system is all about energy, its capture, distribution and use.

Energy, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one state or form into another and always on a slightly lower level. Even nuclear energy is merely the conversion of mass, a form of "captured" energy, into "free" or useable energy, usually in the form of heat. In modern nuclear power plants that heat is first transferred to liquid sodium or some other high temperature medium which carries it through very high temperature pipes to a water boiler where it generates high pressure steam. The steam goes through a turbine which is connected to an electric generator. The turbine generator converts the heat from the steam into electricity which is transported into the grid which distributes the energy to end users from factories and municipalities to homes and offices. There the energy that started as nuclear was converted to heat in the steam and then converted into mechanical energy by the turbine and finally into electrical energy by the generator and distributed by the electric grid. It is then converted into light and mechanical energy in tools including everything from arc furnaces for steel to kitchen mechanical mixers, to office computers, to the charger in a few new battery powered electrical vehicles. In coal fired power plants the heat is supplied by the combustion of coal but the turbines and generators are virtually identical, The advantage of nuclear over coal fired boilers include, lower cost, higher safety, lower pollution and no CO2 emission.

Whether it is to light a city, power a factory, move a family car, pump irrigation water or heat a home, it is all energy. Whether it comes from an electric outlet, a tank of fuel, a trainload of coal, a battery or group of batteries, a fuel cell, a solar cell, a hydroelectric turbine or a wind-driven generator, it is all energy. Whether measured in kilowatts or horsepower, it is all energy. That’s what we all pay for one way or another. Generally, the more power we use, the more we pay. With gasoline costs around three dollars a gallon most people pay about sixteen cents per mile for liquid fuel. The exact same amount of energy from your household outlet would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of four cents. That’s one fourth the cost of liquid fuel. The problem is to get energy from the electric generator into a practical vehicle, economically and efficiently and to give that vehicle sufficient range to satisfy those who use the vehicles. In effect, that is the real point of this book: to examine as many ways as possible of providing portable energy in a practical way and at reasonable cost to the traveling public.

There are many possible ways to power mobile vehicles other than the way we are now using almost exclusively– gasoline or diesel powered internal combustion engines. Using nuclear power to generate electricity and developing a practical method of putting that energy into a vehicle which can use it seems to this writer to be one of the best and least expensive alternatives to the present system and best for the environment in the long run. Whether it involves hydrogen and fuel cells, innovative new batteries, converting hydrogen into methanol for use as or in a fuel blend, or technologies yet to be invented, remains to be seen.

Why? We are running out of cheap oil which currently adds large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, coal fired generators would add even more massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, crop based fuels would have a major negative effect on the food supply, and other sources of electric power all have serious drawbacks. Nuclear energy is the safest, least intrusive, and least expensive source of energy apt to be available in the foreseeable future in sufficient quantities to satisfy our growing need.

Page 13: “Big Oil can sleep easy for another decade or two should we wait for hydrogen fuel-cells to wean the west off its addiction to oil. Hydrogen Vehicle Won't Be Viable Soon, Study Says” - by Nancy Stauffer
Spokesperson for Laboratory for Energy and the Environment of MIT - Boston - Mar 07, 2003

Page 18: Micro turbine powered hybrid electric buses, trolleys and other transit vehicles today deliver benefits unattainable through conventional approaches. Partnering power generation with electricity storage:

1, Achieves dramatically lower nitrogen oxide emissions with no pollution controls.

2. Cuts operational and maintenance costs.

3. Maximizes in-service availability.

4. Enables vehicle size, payload and operating range capabilities impossible with electric-only vehicles.

5. Provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, bio-fuels, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement.

Page 32: In the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, Mathew L.Wald writes:

“President Bush has called hydrogen the ‘freedom fuel,’ but hydrogen is not free, in either dollars or environmental damage. The hydrogen fuel-cell costs nearly 100 times as much per unit of power produced as an internal combustion engine. ‘To be price competitive, you’ve got to be at a nickel a watt and we’re at $4 a watt,’ says Tom R. Dawsey, a research associate at Eastman Chemical Company, which makes polymers for fuel-cells. Hydrogen is also about five times as expensive, per unit of useable energy, as gasoline. Simple dollars are only one speed bump on the road to the hydrogen economy. Another is that supplying the energy required to make pure hydrogen may itself cause pollution. Even if that energy is from a renewable source, like the sun or wind, it may have more environmentally sound uses than the production of hydrogen. Distribution and storage of hydrogen—the least dense gas in the universe—are other technological and infrastructure difficulties. So is the safe handling of the gas. Any practical proposal for a hydrogen economy will have to address all these issues.”

Page 38: There are a number of alternative fuels already being used in growing quantities and with vehicles designed to use them. These include methanol, ethanol, E85, M85, bio-diesel, methane and propane. Ethanol has been blended successfully up to 10% in gasoline for several years. Butanol and DMF (dimethyl furan) are both newcomers to the liquid fuel mix. They are both so much like gasoline they will work in virtually any engine that now runs on gasoline.


Page 48: Most of the infrastructure required for the methanol economy as proposed by the author would be directly applicable to the RN fuel economy and even to a hydrogen economy. Should developing technology ever make the hydrogen economy a practical reality, all of the infrastructure required to manufacture hydrogen would already be in place. Not only that, but micro turbine vehicles would run equally well on hydrogen as on other fuels. There would not have to be “two major infrastructure changes.” Since any “portable” energy source could be used for transportation, both the proposed methanol and hydrogen economies are merely distribution systems to move the energy generated in electric power plants to the vehicles needing that power.

Page 56: The Benefits of Changing to a methanol Economy - There are many substantial benefits to be gained by switching to the methanol economy as described in this article. Besides making us energy independent, those benefits include:

1. Reduction in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its greenhouse effects.

2. Reduction in air pollution.

3. Major improvement in the electric power grid with downward pressure on energy prices.

4. Continued use of existing transport, storage and distributions systems with little modification.
5. Increased fuel efficiency over gasoline.

6. Remove our foreign oil requirements.

7. Retain energy money within the US creating a major economic boom.

8. Provide many new, well-paying jobs for Americans.

9. Reduce or eliminate our national interest in the turbulent middle east.

10. Reduce or completely eliminate our indirect financing of Islamic terrorists.

Page 61: NOTE: If the author’s method of energy conversion to methanol is utilized, methanol could be much cheaper than gasoline. This is particularly true now that unleaded gasoline has been fluctuating between $2 and $3 per gallon at the pump and is headed for $4.

Page 73: Gas turbine/electric combinations are used in power plants for increasing numbers of buildings and remote locations with costs lower than that of power from the electric grid. This includes small, even portable power plants. Growing in popularity with bus and truck owners, “microturbine” powered hybrid vehicles are showing up all over the world in increasing numbers.

NOTE: As this is written, I am preparing once again to contact my representatives, media personalities and others who have the public’s attention with the latest information as contained in the current edition of this book.

I could really use some help here. If you are at all concerned about fuel costs, global warming, or pollution of the environment by fuel use byproducts, please help me with this mission or at least give me names of those I might contact. Also, let me know of any group or organization that might be interested in having me lecture to them on the subject of the book.

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THE LECTURE I have prepared on the same subject as the book is available to virtually any group or organization interested in learning about the economic and environmental benefits the systems described in the book provide. For information about the lecture, goto http://www.hjacslect.blogspot.com/. Information on how to arrange for me to give the lecture to your group or organization is also available in this blog or by contacting me at hobarb@yahoo.com.

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If you are at all concerned with the energy/fuel crisis or the growing emissions of carbon dioxide and its possible impact on global warming, here’s another way to help!

While I will continue to send copies of this book to any interested individual, group or government agency I can find, I desperately need many more people to provide appropriate recipients. Should any reader of this blog want a hard copy of my book please email me at hobarb@netscape.com or hobarb@yahoo.com I would also like you to send me information– address, email, etc.– of any media person, celebrity or politician you might know who might be interested in the energy industry or environment, especially anyone with whom you are acquainted and could get to look at my book. It would be doubly helpful if you could write a letter or send an email using your good name. I would even be willing to write the letter for you to send– or at least provide you with a finished package to sign and send. I would certainly give you total control over any type of contact.

To return to the HJ Solutions blog, click on http://www.hjsolutions.blogspot.com/

I could use some help!

Late breaking information about my latest edition of, “SOLUTIONS!”

This new book should interest all of you, regardless of your political or social leanings or agenda. It contains a broad range of information about energy, fuels, power generation, their environmental impact, and associated subjects. It also provides some real answers to the basic questions about this important subject. These answers are ready to implement NOW! Not in decades, but maybe even months. Some are even in use as I write.

This Information should give you some idea what is in the book. Starting with the table of contents, it then highlights some significant excerpts from the book.

NOTE: As this is written, I am preparing to once again contact my representatives, media personalities and others who have the public’s attention with the latest information as contained in the current edition of this book. I could really use some help here. If you are at all concerned about fuel costs, global warming, or pollution of the environment by fuel use byproducts, please help me with this publicity or at least give me names of those I might contact.

The exciting news is that the microturbine power system described in the introductory story about the tribrid car has already become a practical reality and is in use. This proven system provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, bio-fuels, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement.

I continue to send copies of this book to any interested group or government agency I can find. Should anyone want a hard copy of my book please email me at hobarb@netscape.com or hobarb@yahoo.com

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SOLUTIONS! – the book – contents:

Author’s Comments about Section 1 Page 1

Section 1 - The SUPER Hydrogen Energy Economy Page 4
Purpose and background
Hydrogen Vehicle Won’t be Viable Soon, Study Says Page 10
An Interesting scenario -
A day in the Life of a Tribrid© Car Page 14
The turbine powered Tribrid© car is here! Almost Page 16
What this scenario could point to Page 17
Another Scenario of the Future Page 22

ESSAYS ABOUT THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY
The Hydrogen Fuel-cell System - lots of hype Page 24
Why the hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle may not be all Page 25
it's cracked up to be.
Practical Alternatives to the Hydrogen Economy Page 29
Alternate Fuels - Fuels for the Future Page 30
Reports on Methanol Manufacture Page 32
Methanol: New Infrastructure - Economic Boon Page 38

OVERVIEW OF MODERN ENERGY SYSTEMS
I Fuels Page 46
II Fueled power systems Page 54
III Electric power plants Page 56

THE TRIBRID VEHICLE Page 61
Alternativesto the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle Page 33
The Methanol/Electric Economy - Steps on the way Page 67
Power sources for generators in tribrid© vehicles. Page 68
Engines and other power devices Page 71
Summary of Power Devices Page 73
A Case for a Gradual Transition - Evolutionary Page 74
Where will we get the Required Methanol Page 75
The problem of Lack of Glamour & Lack of Cost Page 76

SUMMARY AND A CALL TO ACTION: Page 77

ADDENDUM
A collection of correspondence to and from people who have strong and
varying interests in the energy economy.
Dr. Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy Page 79
SFNovelist writers group Page 85
Co-opAmerica, Sustainability This Summer Page 91
Letter and reply - Indiana Senator Luger Page 95

A FANCIFUL TALE BASED ON REALITIES THAT MAY AFFECT THE SYSTEMS DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK WHILE DRASTICALLY CHANGING OUR LIVES IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE

The Ultranet - a Journey through the near future? Page 101

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SOLUTIONS! – the book – some significant excerpts:

Title page: Some radical, but practical ideas for designing a system to solve our energy problem by replacing all fossil fuels with renewable fuels. This system, from raw material to fuel in vehicles, would also be a huge economic boon and even help solve some of our vexing environmental problems.

Purpose, Page i: 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.

Page ii: I believe the system I came up with and have outlined in this book to be far better than the hydrogen fuel-cell system in virtually every aspect. This system will be:

1. Relatively inexpensive to utilize
2. Far easier, simpler and less expensive to implement than the hydrogen system
3. Adaptable to and can use most of existing infrastructure.
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, high paying 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 of public concerns, but net carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly reduced if not eliminated

Page 2: Purpose:
to propose timely, affordable and practical solutions to the energy crisis facing our nation including:

1. The growing consumption and dwindling supply of petroleum based fuels in the entire world. This is aggravated by the now rapidly expanding economies of the huge nations of China and India among many others.

2 The growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its link to global warming.

3 The increasingly dangerous transfer of huge amounts of money from the US (and many other free-world countries) to totalitarian regimes that threaten, indeed promise, our destruction.

Page 2: This section proposes solutions in years, instead of decades, with little infrastructure changes using existing technologies.

In short it will:

1. Almost completely replace fossil fuels, petroleum and coal, for transportation and electrical power.

2. Stop the rapid increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

3. Stem the drastic hemorrhage of money now going mostly to totalitarian nations that vow our destruction.

4. Provide an immense growth in our economy with many high-paying jobs right here in the US. It could very easily be the biggest opportunity for growth in our economy ever and a real answer to many environmental concerns.

Page 5: “Big Oil can sleep easy for another decade or two should we wait for hydrogen fuel-cells to wean the west off its addiction to oil. Hydrogen Vehicle Won't Be Viable Soon, Study Says” - by Nancy Stauffer
Spokesperson for Laboratory for Energy and the Environment of MIT - Boston - Mar 07, 2003

Page 9: Microturbine powered hybrid electric buses, trolleys and other transit vehicles today deliver benefits unattainable through conventional approaches. Partnering power generation with electricity storage:

1. Achieves dramatically lower NOx emissions with no pollution controls

2. Cuts operational and maintenance costs

3. Maximizes in-service availability

4. Enables vehicle size, payload and operating range capabilities impossible with electric-only vehicles

5. Provides fuel flexibility impossible with others as it can be fueled by: gasoline, diesel, methanol, ethanol, natural gas, bio-fuels, propane and even hydrogen. No other currently supported technology can come even close to making this statement.

Page 13: In the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, Mathew L.Wald writes:

“President Bush has called hydrogen the ‘freedom fuel,’ but hydrogen is not free, in either dollars or environmental damage. The hydrogen fuel-cell costs nearly 100 times as much per unit of power produced as an internal combustion engine. ‘To be price competitive, you’ve got to be at a nickel a watt and we’re at $4 a watt,’ says Tom R. Dawsey, a research associate at Eastman Chemical Company, which makes polymers for fuel-cells. Hydrogen is also about five times as expensive, per unit of useable energy, as gasoline. Simple dollars are only one speed bump on the road to the hydrogen economy. Another is that supplying the energy required to make pure hydrogen may itself cause pollution. Even if that energy is from a renewable source, like the sun or wind, it may have more environmentally sound uses than the production of hydrogen. Distribution and storage of hydrogen—the least dense gas in the universe—are other technological and infrastructure difficulties. So is the safe handling of the gas. Any practical proposal for a hydrogen economy will have to address all these issues.”

Page 15: There are a number of alternative fuels already being used in growing quantities and with vehicles designed to use them. These include methanol, ethanol, E85, M85, bio-diesel, methane and propane. Ethanol has been blended successfully up to 10% in gasoline for several years.

Page 20: Most of the infrastructure required for the methanol economy as proposed by the author would be directly applicable to the ME fuel economy and even to a hydrogen economy. Should developing technology ever make the hydrogen economy a practical reality, all of the infrastructure required to manufacture hydrogen would already be in place. Not only that, but microturbine vehicles would run equally well on hydrogen as on other fuels. There would not have to be “two major infrastructure changes.” Since any “portable” energy source could be used for transportation, both the proposed methanol and hydrogen economies are merely distribution systems to move the energy generated in electric power plants to the vehicles needing that power.

Page 22: The Benefits of Changing to a methanol Economy - There are many substantial benefits to be gained by switching to the methanol economy as described in this article. Besides making us energy independent, those benefits include:

1. Reduction in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its greenhouse effects.

2. Reduction in air pollution.

3. Major improvement in the electric power grid with downward pressure on energy prices.

4. Continued use of existing transport, storage and distributions systems with little modification.

5. Increased fuel efficiency over gasoline.

6. Remove our foreign oil requirements.

7. Retain energy money within the US creating a major economic boom.

8. Provide many new, well paying jobs for Americans.

9. Reduce or eliminate our national interest in the turbulent middle east.

10. Reduce or completely eliminate our indirect financing of Islamic terrorists.

This final excerpt from the University of Florida Report on one method of producing methanol. Additions and notations by the author to this quote are indicated by bold italics.

Start of quote

CHAPTER 9 - CONCLUSIONS

1. The amount of petroleum imported into the United States is greater than during the energy crisis of the 1970s and is increasing.

2. Of the alternatives for primary chemical energy, only natural gas and coal are available in energy quantities comparable to petroleum.

3. Recoverable reserves of coal will last at least five times as long as technically recoverable natural gas or petroleum in the U.S.

4. Because of the possibility that the time scale for a substantial hydrogen infrastructure might be significantly longer than the time scale for the continued availability of inexpensive petroleum, an intermediate liquid transportation fuel might be appropriate.

5. Methanol is the most desirable liquid hydrocarbon fuel for fuel cells and can be effectively utilized in internal combustion engines using existing technologies.

6. Methanol and hydrogen are both being produced primarily from natural gas feedstocks, but both can be and have been produced in quantity from coal.

7. It is likely that there will be significant increases in both prices and quantities of imported natural gas, if demand continues to increase as expected.

8. If demand continues to increase as expected, natural gas might not be an appropriate feedstock for future alternative fuels due to availability and cost.

9. The recent historical trends have indicated a decrease in the price of coal with increasing demand and production. It is likely that coal prices will be relatively stable, possibly decreasing somewhat, even with large increases in production.

10. From the standpoints of projected costs and attributes as a fuel for both fuel cells and internal combustion engines, methanol could be an effective alternative fuel.

11. If environmental and other relevant issues can be satisfactorily resolved, coal-based methanol could provide relatively stable fuel prices and increased energy independence for many decades.

12. There are environmental and other issues to be considered if there is to be large-scale utilization of methanol as a transportation fuel. (Only if it is produced using coal or natural gas as a raw material. HJ)

13. There are environmental issues to be considered if there is to be a significant increase in the utilization of coal as a primary energy resource. (The primary one being the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. HJ)

14. Projections indicate that fuel taxes must be imposed on any significant distribution of alternative fuels in order to maintain adequate tax revenues.

15. Since there is such disparity among energy content per volume of alternative fuels, it is likely that taxes will be modified to reflect energy rather than volume fuel purchases.

16. It is projected that hydrogen produced on-board a fuel cell vehicle from coal-based methanol will cost less than off-board produced hydrogen.

17. While all alternative fuels are expected to be more expensive to the consumer than present-day gasoline, methanol produced from coal is likely to be the least expensive of the fuels considered, if natural gas prices increase as projected.

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Page 23: NOTE: If the author’s method of energy conversion to methanol is utilized, methanol could be much cheaper than gasoline. This is particularly true now that unleaded gasoline has been fluctuating between $2 and $3 per gallon at the pump.

Page 28: Gas turbine/electric combinations are used in power plants for increasing numbers of buildings and remote locations with costs lower than that of power from the electric grid. This includes small, even portable power plants. Growing in popularity with bus and truck owners, “microturbine” powered hybrid vehicles are showing up all over the world in increasing numbers.

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.
______________________________________________

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