"From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States."......Thomas Midgley, American inventor, 1921.......Hey, maybe we can get Bill Murray to play him in the movie, and Pelosi herself.
Poor Midgley; he couldn't have guessed the 7.5 million cars and trucks on the dirt roads of 1921
ReplyDeletewould grow to 255 million zipping
around on asphalt and concrete.
I guess that my point here was that every generation or two somebody comes up with some cockamamie idea (electric cars, ethanol, palm oil, waste products, etc.) that everybody thinks is going to be some silver bullet and then we a) spend a crap load of money on it and b) recycle it 50-100 years later thinking that this time somehow it's going to be different.
ReplyDeleteRecycling ideas-probably the same as nuclear (unless fusion become
ReplyDeletepractical). It is probably best to
avoid predictions in any event.
At least nuclear has power density and can match up to scale. Some of this other stuff....
ReplyDelete