You know, I'm really surprised that people haven't called out McCain for his historical inaccuracies. He said at one point of the other night's debate that the "last President to raise taxes during hard economic times was Hoover, pointing out that he was practically rode out of Washington on a rail."
However, I don't think we should be so quick to forget the very infamous, "Read my lips: No New Taxes!" line that George H. W. Bush (Bush I) ran on, the "I won't raise your taxes" platform. Of course, he proceeded to raise taxes when the crap from the Reagan years finally hit the fan. Bush raised taxes, and Bill Clinton hammered him hard on that because of the promise he'd made, which pointed to poor judgment and a failure to recognize the state of the reality around him. Clinton also included his own promise, that realistic notion that, in order for the economy to get better and for government to achieve a balanced budget, he would need to raise taxes himself before it was all over.
Indeed, after he was elected, during hard economic times, he raised taxes a couple of times, in small increments, in order to help increase government revenues and to help pay for the new programs that were needed to stimulate the economy so that we could then find our way out of the recession that we were then in.
I would like to give Senator McCain a dose of reality: keeping the current tax cuts or increasing them in any way will NOT allow you to continue to prosecute your unfounded war in Iraq AND help our economy, not unless we as a nation are willing to make some HUGE and significant sacrifices, as the Greatest Generation did in WWII. Without those kids of sacrifices from our people at home, we cannot grow the economy and pay for these wars abroad at the rate they're spending money on that alone.
Frankly, what we need is a New "New Deal." We can begin by ending the war, which will be one of the single biggest steps to helping the country move in the right direction. What's more, Senator Obama's plan to invest in alternative energy development at every level and to work on updating our outdated energy infrastructure is probably the single most effective means to make significant returns off of the government's expenditures.
The sad fact is that our energy infrastructure is so bad, so outdated, that it actually can't store any energy whatsoever.
One of the biggest problems with our infrastructure is that energy has to be produced almost at the moment it is demanded. That means that the energy usage at any particular time must be closely monitored and surges in demand have to be predicted with tremendous accuracy in order to increase supply at just the right moment to meet the increase in demand. This archaic system means that alternative energy supplies, like wind and solar, are almost useless, particularly when it comes to the energy markets.
Because our system is the way it is, states and communities that have upgraded to utilize wind, for instance, have had to update their infrastructure to be able to store and deliver that energy to homes. However, because these updated grids are of necessity isolated from and incompatible with the older grids, there is no way to move that energy across country to areas that might need it more than the area in which it's produced. This means that when California deserts' or midwest plains' wind farms are creating a surplus of energy, there is no way to transfer or sell that energy to, say, Colorado or Chicago because these areas do not have a grid capable of receiving this energy. In essence, this means that if there are strong winds at night, producing energy when the demand is generally at its lowest, there is no way to either store significant amounts of this energy surplus or to transfer or sell it to areas that might need it at the time it's available.
Our energy grid is wasting far more energy than anything else, but if we were to strongly invest in a nation-wide upgrade or our energy grid, we could finally use these alternative technologies to their fullest, channeling this new energy across the nation at the flip of a switch and more efficiently utilizing the energy that is created. Furthermore, we could build in a significant storage capacity, thereby allowing us to store energy that isn't used so that it could be instantaneously transferred to areas where it's needed as soon as the demand increases, eliminating the need to instantaneously produce new energy simply because there's a surge in demand (you have no idea what it takes to make sure the NFL Super Bowl go off without a hitch when TVs across the country are switched on all at once).
Furthermore, once we update the grid, we will be able to fully utilize new, radical energy producing technologies, like plug-in hybrid cars, to their fullest extent. With plug-in hybrid technology, you plug in your car when not in use to recharge the system should it have lost significant battery power during long driving periods. However, if you just use your car for driving in-town to go to work and back or to run a few errands, your car actually creates energy during braking and uses that to keep the batteries recharged. This means that when you come home to plug in your car, you actually have a surplus of energy in your car and can now feed that energy back into the grid rather than take more energy out of the grid. In many cases, such energy production would actually mean that most households would become energy suppliers to the utilities in their area, meaning that you would actually get a check from the utility company at the end of the month rather than a bill.
Not only are these kinds of things possible with a renewed investment in energy infrastructure, but in many cases homes can become completely self-sufficient with very little expenditure. For instance, one inventor (I can't remember his name at the moment) has developed a wind turbine that is small yet extremely efficient. It is basically an open rectangular box with a cork-screw type fan in the center. This shape of the fan allows it to collect wind from virtually any angle, and because it can collect wind from any angle it can also be installed at any angle. A rather small turbine, then, could be installed horizontally on a home's roof, or one might be installed vertically in one's yard if there is sufficient space to allow wind to come through the yard area regularly. If homes and office buildings had these kinds of turbines, they would become almost entirely energy independent and would need very little from the grid each month, thereby saving millions of dollars each month across the nation.
Of course, one really effective way to save energy would be for every home and office building to convert to LED lighting. LED lights use something like 1/100 to 1/1000 of the energy of incandescent lighting, currently the most popular form of lighting in homes. LEDs are in fact so efficient, they make the compact florescent bulbs that most people use to save energy look like gas guzzlers. Furthermore, LED lights are now made in just about every shape, size, and form, allowing us to use them widely, as they're available for just about every use conceivable, making it entirely possible for us to use nothing but LED lighting, from lighting homes and business to lighting streets at night (LEDs are already used in almost every new street signal light in red, yellow, and green, making these lights last for up to 20 years without needed replacement or repair). Because LED lights last up to 20 years in most applications, they need to be replace very infrequently, making them extremely cost effective despite their seemingly high cost of adoption. If the government were to provide significant incentives to individuals and to business to convert to this type of lighting, the benefits would be widely felt almost immediately, making energy demand far less than it is now and thereby making energy far cheaper to supply than it is currently, helping to make up for the energy consuming areas that are hard to replace with more efficient means, like air conditioning units, though that too has an alternative.
Has anyone ever heard of a geothermal well? Well, let me give you a little insight. Geothermal wells are small holes drilled about 200 feet into the earth. Because the earth at depth maintains a constant temperature of about 55 degrees, the earth can essentially become an element to be used for heating or cooling. By drilling this hole and then running a water circuit into the hole, water can be fed into compressors or condensers that can then be used to heat and cool a home with little or no energy cost. In the summer months, the water would draw heat from the system and take it deep into the earth where the cooler temperatures would then cool the water before it is brought back up and put back into the system. In the cooler winter months, the exact opposite occurs: the colder water is actually warmed by it's journey into the earth and then put into the system to provide heating for the home or building. These systems cost only a few thousand dollars to install and will save hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes in energy costs.
There are other green energy saving ideas that can be put into use on a much larger scale than they are currently, like greenscaping on building roofs. Large cities--and even smaller towns and individual homes--can begin to use greenscaping on their roofs instead of using tar and tile as a roofing option. Greenscapes are extremely important for large metro areas, however, because they can help to drastically reduce large amounts of heat produced by the black tar roofs of such cities during the hot summer months, not to mention they can help insulate these buildings in the colder winter months far better than current systems.
In Chicago, they have already done this for most of the city-owned buildings, and they are currently encouraging building owners and developers to use this technique on a city-wide scale. By covering flat roofs with soil and then planting savanna-type environments (or whatever happens to be useful in your area to be sustainable by your annual rainfall) on the rooftops, the significant heat that is generated by these black surfaces in the summer months is hugely reduced, meaning that these cities can lower the overall temperature for the entire city by several degrees.
As it is, many cities in warmer areas--a very large number of cities with global temperatures on the rise--generate extreme amounts of heat during the day, causing a "heat bubble" effect around the metro area. This heat bubble not only causes local temperatures to increase by up to 10 degrees higher than the surrounding rural areas, but it also means that when there is the potential for cooling rains to come into the city these storms often peter out before they can drop any meaningful precipitation on the city itself, mostly because the increased heat around the city lowers dew points and decreases the water saturation in the air because hotter air can simply hold more water, meaning that it won't rain when it otherwise would have. If we can help keep cities to produce overall less heat by reducing the amount of black tar surfaces that are collecting, amplifying, storing, and then reflecting this heat back into the atmosphere, particularly at night, then we can help to restore natural cycles of rainfall in metropolitan areas that have seen a significant decrease in annual rainfall due to the heat bubble effect (and believe me, when you live in a place like Phoenix, AZ, that heat bubble can be massive and impenetrable, leaving us high and dry during our rainy season most of the time, which also means that we remain hotter than we should because the cooling effect of the rain never comes).
We can also save ourselves money in the area of water consumption, an often overlooked cost both monetarily as well as environmentally where conservation can help many areas. We now have what are called "gray water" systems. Gray water is that water that is used for purposes like showering, washing dishes or clothes, or brushing teeth. This non-sewage water is currently moved out of the home and into the regular sewer system, both increasing the volume of water in city sewers and in city water treatment plants, making it more expensive to recycle this water for additional use, not to mention the fact that water used for landscaping can amount to up to 50% of a home's water consumption. Gray water collects the non-sewage water in the home, filters it, and then redistributes it for non-human consumption uses like landscaping. This means that we can essentially use this water twice--once for basic cleaning and once for watering gardens and lawns, washing cars, a considerable drain on water resources. By using a gray-water system, homes can reduce their water usage by more than half, which not only reduces their water bill by the same amount but also makes it less costly for cities to treat water because they're treating significantly less of it.
Speaking of water, I'd like to end on one final note. There has been a lot of talk over the last several years about fuel cell technology, how it is the wave of the future, how it will revolutionize personal transportation, energy production, etc, etc. However, the one HUGE problem with the fuel cell is that it requires a source of hydrogen for fuel. Now, many people think that it is fairly easy to put water into a system and to strip away the O2 molecules, leaving only pure hydrogen for your fuel cell. Well, it's not quite that easy. In fact, it's traditionally been very difficult to get hydrogen from water because the covalent bonds between the O2 molecules and the hydrogen molecules are very strong. Oxygen is what we hear about when people talk about "free radicals." Oxygen molecules are so starved for an additional couple of electrons in the outer ring of the molecule that this property makes oxygen one of the single most reactive gasses on the periodic chart. Often, in order to break the covalent bonds formed by water and hydrogen, it takes something far more reactive in order to attract those oxygen molecules, meaning that it often requires more energy to produce hydrogen for fuel than the fuel cell would create or save.
Jerry Woodall, at Purdue University, has actually come up with a very simple way to produce pure hydrogen fuel from water, however: aluminum! It seems so simple on the face of it, but it's more difficult than one might imagine. Pure aluminum is so reactive that as soon as it has contact with air during it's cooling process, it forms a skin on its surface, a skin of aluminum oxide, that is, a skin of bonded aluminum and oxygen molecules. Of course, that has been the problem: aluminum is so reactive and so desperately wants the same kind of bond that oxygen is seeking, it readily sucks the oxygen right out of the air, rendering the aluminum inert at that point, preventing further reactions with water.
What is needed is a way to keep the aluminum from reacting with the oxygen molecules in the air so that when it is introduced to, say, water, it will react with that to strip away the oxygen molecules there instead, producing clean hydrogen. Only problem is that aluminum in such a state can be dangerously volatile, and it would also need some means of protecting it from the air before introducing the water.
Woodall solved this problem accidentally. He was mixing an aluminum alloy in his lab, a mixture of aluminum and gallium, for a particular use. After he was done smelting the metals to make the alloy, he dropped the alloy into water for cooling, at which point he witnessed a massive reaction that caused water to bubble over quite rapidly, evaporating the water completely in mere seconds. Stunned (and somewhat injured), he began to investigate what had went wrong. He soon discovered that what he had done was to make a kind of aluminum that would not react with the oxygen in the air but with the oxygen in the water, stripping the oxygen molecules and leaving pure hydrogen as it's by product. This happy accident was perhaps the discovery of our generation.
The biggest problem with using hydrogen as a fuel source is that it can be costly to produce, often costing more than it would save if used to run a fuel cell car, for instance. What's more, storing and shipping large quantities of hydrogen can be very dangerous, as hydrogen itself is quite volatile and will easily ignite if not properly taken care of. By creating this alloy, which is incredibly stable in the natural environment as long as no liquid water is present, Jerry made it entirely possible to use hydrogen on a wide scale and at the same time made it infinitely safer because transporting and handling this stable metal alloy is far better than long-term storage and transportation of pure hydrogen gas. Now, all one need to do is introduce this alloy, along with water, into a fuel generating and containment-delivery system (something like a gas tank), and you have instant, cheap hydrogen available for fuel cell cars and myriad other uses, like home generating stations that can also be used to make homes and business entirely self-sufficient.
What's the downside? Well, you do have to keep making the material, which has it's own costs, but Jerry has refined the alloy significantly, allowing us to recycle it again and again, possibly ad infinitum, in order to give us the means to constantly create readily available hydrogen fuel from ordinary water at a fraction of the cost of producing hydrogen the old fashioned way. (Jerry has now made the alloy with a blend of 95% aluminum and 5% of a mixture of gallium, indium, and tin, significantly reducing the use of the rather expensive gallium. What's more, because what's left of the metal after the reaction with water is pure aluminum oxide, it is much cheaper to recycle and to produce more aluminum for use than it is to produce aluminum from bauxite ore, which often is mined in the rain forests of South America and is one of the leading causes for deforestation in regions where the ore is found--saving and renewing the rain forest is itself a huge step in the right direction environmentally, reinvigorating some of the largest carbon sinks on the planet.
In the end, green energy and energy efficiency of the kind that Obama is talking about, along with the government investment in the infrastructure and technology used to make this new green energy viable and available, is not only a way for us to achieve energy independence--probably THE top national security interest we have right now--but it's a way for us to create a significant amount of new jobs as well as to help make significant and immediate gains in reducing harmful greenhouse emissions while creating new or renewed means of reducing the overall carbon in the atmosphere in the form of natural carbon sinks, in the form of preserving the rain forests and the old-growth deciduous forests that are so important to our overall environmental health.
Only Obama would be willing to challenge the status-quo in Washington DC in order to get these kinds of energy measures on the table and into the budget so that we can actually begin work toward what now seems like an impossible task.
If one considers no other issue than this, it makes voting extermely easy, as the long-term ramifications of where we go with this one issue pretty much makes John McCain irrelevant. Even if you are a Republican, it is in both your short-term and long-term economic and national security interests to ensure that Obama is the man who takes office come January and that this election isn't even close.
It is time to send a mandate to the neo-Cons that have hijacked the Republican Party to serve their own needs, in direct conflict with the greater good. It is time for true Republicans to retake their party from the Bush's and McCain's of the world. I know that most people would think this a ridiculous notion, but to be realistic, even if Hoover was the guy to originally raise taxes in hard economic times, he was quickly followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who similarly increased both taxes and government spending, spurring the largest government investment in establishing and greatly increasing the important infrastructure in this country before or since--the New Deal build roads, highways, hydroelectric dam systems, bridges, rail, schools, and other public buildings, the first time the government ever invested in serious infrastructure on that scale in our history.
McCain can draw comparisons to Hoover (a Republican) if he wants to, but he does so to his detriment--references to Hoover (a Republican) only remind people of FDR (a Democrat), who won an unprecedented 4 terms as President and presided over the most successful government-stimulated economic recovery in history, not to mention that he deftly guided this nation through the greatest war ever fought by our armed forces, turning an isolationist nation with a very small standing army into a nation with the largest, most efficient fighting force ever assembled in human history. None of this could have been done without both government spending and individual sacrifice undertaken by every American.
Only Obama can stimulate that kind of movement in this country, as only Obama is the kind of leader that inspires in a way similar to FDR was able to do, similar to JFK.
McCain's biggest problem, to be honest, is that he understands none of this, and his running mate is more than 4 times as ignorant as he is regarding such things. To put these two in office would be pure stupidity on the part of the American public, on a scale never before imagined by anyone, and that says a lot after 8 years of Bush. We'll surely incur the wrath of the world and the disdain of our current allies, who will soon after election day become our greatest critics and perhaps even our future enemies, ensuring that we become isolated in the world as we plunge deeper and deeper into economic, social, and military ruin, giving bin Laden exactly what he wanted after 9/11.
Bin Laden knew a little about what he would get when he attacked New York, and so far he's gotten everything he could have asked for and so much more. I think of him now sitting in his cave or his hacienda, sipping tea and celebrating a success that is beyond anything he could have dreamed up in his sick, sordid, hateful little brain.
Obama clearly won the debate, and McCain clearly lost. That should be entirely apparent, just based on how each candidate carried himself. What's more, should the American people fail to do the right thing in November, reversing the apparent course of events, we'll all suffer well into the lives of our great-grandchildren.
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