Dylan Rtigan is hosting an important conversation on energy solutions from a Town Hall panel live from Oklahoma State University at 8PM ET / 7PM CST tonight. The goal is to generate the political will to reduce our dependence on oil.
Panelists include:
· Boone Pickens, Oil Tycoon & Founder, BP Capital Management
· Ashwin Madia, VoteVets.org
· Bob Deans, Director of Federal Communications, Natural Resources Defense Council
· Former CIA Director James Woolsey
View it below:
Watch live streaming video from dylanratigan at livestream.com
Or you can also view it at Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/DylanMSNBC?v=app_142371818162).
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asking T Boone Pickens about energy independence is like asking BP abouth oil rig safety.
It’s amazing how these completely untrustworthy, “serious people”, end up with national forums to spew their propaganda.
I suppose T Boone is going to say we aren’t fracking enough.
T Boone maybe biased because of his natural gas assets, but at least he is bringing up the subject.
Both sides of the political spectrum win on a good energy policy (Dems = environment win and Repubs = national security win), but both sides would rather both lose than both win. It’s embarrassing.
While I recognize that members of the panel have ‘private interests’, I found the conversation a breath of fresh air. The statistics provided were worth the view alone, and I hope Ratigan’s show lists them. The panel members were thoughtful, courteous, and I thought the range of topics (from ‘sustainable communities’ to the relative prices of wind, natural gas, and oil) were engaging.
I found the former CIA director, and his awareness of kilowatts per mile costs for driving his Prius and Volt (around 2 cents per mile), contrasted with his miles per gallon costs (about 14 cents) particularly enlightening.
May more of us soon talk about our transportation costs in kpm, rather than mpg (kilowatts/mile vs miles/gallon).
The VoteVets speaker struck me as an exceptionally thoughtful person.
Woolsey has been saying this for years. Since he stepped down as CIA director this has been his pet project, as it’s a massive national security issue.
Nice reality based discussion.
I came across a provocative article today discussing a new process making hydrogen fuel safe. Most interesting is this technology’s capacity for readily adapting to existing infrastructure (engines and fueling stations).
Per hydrogen production, the article promotes our fascist-in-chief’s “renewables” scam. I’m a pebble bed, high temperature, gas cooled nuclear reactor man. I’m sure Patrick Moore, founding member of Greenpeace still is with me on this (problems at the aged, stricken Japanese plant notwithstanding)…
At the moment, 97% of current hydrogen production comes from fossil fuels. Mostly coal gasification which produces an extremely high amount of CO2 as a by-product. The other 3% is from electrolysis, and I think T. Boone Pickens was alluding to that process when he quoted $75/gallon production cost. This hydrogen is used in some semi manufacturing processes. Intel can afford it, but we can’t.
Some nuclear physicists have pointed out that the high heat in a nuclear reactor can crack water into hydrogen. Pebble bed reactors would be perfect for this application because the technology is ready for small size plants and they only produce low level radioactive waste which is relatively easily stored. (China has two under construction as electric utilities)
But fuel cell drive train efficiency in a car is about 50%. Electric drive train efficiency is 75%. So it would probably be more cost effective to go the electric route.
@TC
One problem with nuclear is we will face a shortfall in nuclear fuel in the next 20 years once the U.S. and Russia stop feeding weapons grade fuel back to the power plants. Then if we can replace it with new supplies, and that’s a big if, they will probably be in a place that is just as big of a pain as the Middle East.