Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics
In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.
I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what he was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it and get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy than you added to it.”
“Exactly.”
I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.
He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”
Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.
“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.
“No. Not only would I not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”
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I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.
Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.
Until recently, I would have said: moose, maple syrup, and frozen tundra.
I’m ready to live in a country with zero hateful morons, if that counts.
As shown here, people have an infinite variety of ways to express their loathing of Trump.
My maternal grandfather was born in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1903 and told me when I was a boy that in the 1920s, times were so good that saloon owners would offer a free lunch, consisting of bread, cheese, and cold cuts. “Sure, they were hoping you’d buy a glass of beer, but they really didn’t mind if you didn’t and simply scarfed down a free sandwich.”
As a financially comfortable, educated, straight white male, one might think I’m impervious to any of Trump’s policies.
At left is a great example of a fallacy called a “false dichotomy.”
What would one expect a sycophant to say?
Here’s a story:
My doctor, who knows that I understand physics and renewable energy in particular, asked me today what I thought about wind turbines on boats.
