Fossil Fuels... a relic of the past. I wish!

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

I stood shivering on the platform.. waiting, blasted by a driving rain and wind. A long wait… But then it came, at last. A tumbling block of steel careering down the track. It pulls into the station with a roar, thick smoke gushing from a black grille, reeking of diesel…

I haven’t taken a train for years. But having just earlier today spent about half an hour standing on a platform, waiting for an Aunt who was rolling into town for a brief visit, it set me thinking, quite sadly, how almost nothing has changed.

I pictured myself standing on that platform 30 yrs ago, as I often would as a lad, having been dragged there against my will by a father whose chief obsession in life was trains.

What differed from my two visions was perhaps a slight modernization in the cosmetic shape and design of the train. But then, as now, the same grille, the same diesel smoke – the same fossil-fuels driving the bullsh*t lie which is transport, power and industry.

And some people say there is no fossil-fuel/energy conspiracy!

It makes me so sad that TPTB see fit to continue perpetuating this Lie for the sake of $$$. They do it because they can. And I do feel that if they could control the oxygen in the air they’d meter it, tax us for every breath.

Diesel trains, or any petroleum driven vehicle, should be an ancient relic of the past. We all know this. I’m sure there are free energy replacements out there to drive our world, perhaps some immediately available, if the right political tool could prise it out into the open. But they are locked. Seemingly forever locked behind the impenetrable force-field of ‘national security’ injunctions and patenting red tape.

But these replacements are there, if only governments, power corporations, or our department of transport, had the vision (or perhaps the spine) to invest their billions in cleaner, faster, and more efficient alternatives such as superconducting trains, or Maglev technology for example (below).

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Every now and again some documentary or other will appear on TV showing us glimpses of trains of the future, cars, cities… technology of the future which is coming. Well it’s been coming for me since I was kid, when I first took notice of ‘the future’ that was coming. And it never did.

[Lone Bean]

The corporations are incapable of thinking beyond what works for them and they could NOT care less about sparing the planet any negativity concerning its' well-being. WE, as an awakening human race simply have to stop expecting changes to come by them and know that any change made for the better has to come from us. WE really do have the power to make immediately and unbelievably HUGE changes for the better right now, at this exact second. Most of us still don't know that we have that ability but thankfully, more and more of us are waking up every day and realizing it and "the powers that WERE" are fully aware that we are waking up. They are displaying their FEAR by their insane actions and crazy law passings, making it perfectly clear to us, that they are rapidly losing control over us.

Don't despair, just keep doing what your doing and it will get better. :)

[Lazlo]

Diesel trains, or any petroleum driven vehicle, should be an ancient relic of the past. We all know this. I’m sure there are free energy replacements out there to drive our world, perhaps some immediately available, if the right political tool could prise it out into the open. But they are locked. Seemingly forever locked behind the impenetrable force-field of ‘national security’ injunctions and patenting red tape.

But these replacements are there, if only governments, power corporations, or our department of transport, had the vision (or perhaps the spine) to invest their billions in cleaner, faster, and more efficient alternatives such as superconducting trains, or Maglev technology for example (below).

Every now and again some documentary or other will appear on TV showing us glimpses of trains of the future, cars, cities… technology of the future which is coming. Well it’s been coming for me since I was kid, when I first took notice of ‘the future’ that was coming. And it never did.

Maglev trains still run on either fossil fuels or nuclear energy. The harsh reality is that there is no "known" energy source which is as abundant and energy dense as fossil fuels. Those visions of the future were provided by people who did not know to make the distinction between energy and technology.

We can all assume that ZPE exists and has been perfected by black programs, but blaming our circumstance of the shadow world is not accepting our own culpability. The real issue is behavior. If people would simply change their behaviors, we would have no need to pollute the environment and enrich the mega corporations. Driving 20 miles to pick up a $5 doo-dad made in China. Burning millions of street lights all night so that people feel "safe." Insisting on "fresh" fruits in the middle of winter. The list goes on.

I have seen it demonstrated that if we switched all security lighting in North America to operate on motion sensors, we could save the equivalent output of several large coal fired power plants.

It doesn't have to be an evil conspiracy. It's simply a matter of smart people getting rich giving us (meaning consumers) what we demand. Heck, we could decommission a major nuclear generating station if people would just put their computers, TVs and cable/satellite boxes on a switch and shut them off completely instead of having them on standby so that we don't "gasp" have to wait 3 minutes for them to boot up after we hit the button.

[Lazlo]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/24/big_data_pollution_cloud_servers_waste_electricity_on_massive_scale_new_york_times_finds_.html

I came across this right after posting. Case in point:

The New York Times this weekend had part one of an in-depth investigation into the environmental impacts of the Internet, and the findings are not pretty. The data centers that store and process everything from your old emails and Facebook data to tweets, Google searches, and e-commerce transactions suck up 2 percent of the nation's entire electricity supply. That's actually more than the notoriously energy-intensive paper industry, belying the myth that a shift to digital information is necessarily better for the planet.

Worse, upwards of 90 percent of that energy is simply wasted. A McKinsey & Company report found that the average data center uses just 6 to 12 percent of its electricity for actual computation. The rest, the Times reports, "was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations." In short, online companies keep their facilities running "at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand," because they fear what could happen if their sites ever went down. The Times adds:


To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.
It's not surprising, then, that the Times found the entire industry shrouded in secrecy. Its investigation required a year's worth of reporting, with thousands of public-records requests and hundreds of interviews.

What can we do about it? Some forms of computing are essential, of course. Servers that help govern transportation infrastructure or national defense systems have a compelling need for deep redundancy. But many of the companies the Times cites are providing what amounts to an inessential service to everyday consumers. Yahoo, for instance, spends huge amounts of energy storing data from people's old fantasy football leagues.