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    Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels
    Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels
    Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels
    Ebook144 pages1 hour

    Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels

    By Thomas Blakeslee

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    About this ebook

    A vision of life without fossil fuels that is not a dream but an achievable plan for our future. The only breakthroughs required are political. The science is already here, but hard work is needed to develop it further and create our new reality. Powerful fossil fuel interests have been amazingly successful in blocking these efforts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Blakeslee
    Release dateNov 11, 2009
    ISBN9781311454973
    Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels
    Author

    Thomas Blakeslee

    Thomas R. Blakeslee is president of The Clearlight Foundation and the author of technical and popular books that have been published in nine different languages. He earned a degree from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California in 1962. After working for IT&T in Antwerp, Belgium, he moved to Silicon Valley where he helped found several startup companies as Engineering Vice President. In 1980 he used his own money to found Orion Instruments Inc. He served as President and then Chairman of the Board until he retired in 1998. A prolific inventor, he holds patents in such diverse fields as photography, hydraulics, electronic circuits, information display, digital telephony, instrumentation and vehicle guidance. Since retiring from Orion, he has focused on managing his own and others investments. After years of successfully investing in oil and gas stocks, he came to the realization that the burning of fossil fuels was ruining our planet through pollution and global warming. His search for practical solutions led him to geothermal energy, where he found an amazing gap between its potential and present reality. Impatient at the slow pace of clean energy development, he went on a search for other technologies capable of providing faster results. The Clearlight Foundation is his vehicle for change: investing his own and friend’s personal savings for the good of the planet.

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      Book preview

      Fuel Free! Living Well Without Fossil Fuels - Thomas Blakeslee

      Fuel Free!

      Living Well Without Fossil Fuels

      by 

      Thomas R Blakeslee

      The Clearlight Foundation

      Fuel Free!: Living Well Without Fossil Fuels

      By Thomas R Blakeslee

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright  2010 by Thomas R Blakeslee

      All rights reserved

      On the Cover: 20 MW Geothermal Power Plant in Guatamala. Ormat Photo copyright Ormat Technology

      Biomass fields photo credit US Department of Energy

      Note about hyperlinks: Underlined text is internet hyperlinks, many of which are listed in the References and Links section at the end. They are all in the online edition at www.clrlight.org/book.pdf .

      Table of Contents

      Foreword

      1 The Elephant Under the Rug: Denial and Failed Energy Projects.

      2. Electric Cars Make Fuel-Free Power Grid Practical

      3 Nuclear Power: The Safe and Easy Way

      4 The Coming Baseload Power Crisis.

      5 Geothermal: Clean Base-load Power from the Earth

      6 Heat is Power. Let’s Stop Throwing it Away!

      7 Beijing’s Showcase Clean Coal Power Plant

      8 Five Ways to Green Existing Coal Power Plants

      9 Drill Baby Drill! For a Clean, Safe Energy Future

      10 Invisible, Underground HVDC Power Costs Same As Ugly Towers

      11 Biochar: The Key to Carbon-Negative Biofuels

      12 Clean Coal: Here Now!

      13 Can Biomass Replace Coal?

      14 CHP Electricity Powers Cars 22 Times Farther Than Ethanol

      15 Solar Power: A Gift from Space

      16 Free as the Wind

      17 NG Fuel Cell Cars: Twice as Efficient as Electric!

      19 Importing Solar Power with Biomass

      20 Restoring Degraded Soils for Carbon Credits

      21 Energy Saving: Much Cheaper Than Building Power Plants!

      About the Author

      References and Links

      Foreword

      Fuel Free!  A rallying cry that’s the opposite of Drill Baby Drill! It’s a vision of life without fossil fuels. This vision is not a dream but an achievable plan for our future. The only breakthroughs required are political. The science is already here, but hard work is needed to develop it further and create our new reality. Powerful fossil fuel interests have been blocking these efforts for years. The time has come for transformation to bring forth this bright new, fuel free world. Instead of fighting wars for fuel we can create green jobs that will make us energy independent. The air will be cleaner and life will be better.

      I wrote this book because I was frustrated by the terrible choices being made by politicians and industry in trying to deal with our energy problems. Short-term thinking, special interests and historical inertia have driven our path almost entirely. As an engineer and entrepreneur, I have developed a skill for recognizing promising approaches.  I decided to look freshly at the whole energy problem and try to sort out the best solutions with a long-term perspective. Short-term thinking is what got us into this mess (and the housing bubble!)  People in the industry tend to become committed to a pet approach and then defend it religiously and irrationally. As an outsider, I felt I could take a more unbiased look at the problems to spot the best solutions.

      If you search Youtube.com for free energy, you will find an amazing collection of energy hoaxes. Pouring water into a tank and then driving a car away apparently looks like a convincing demonstration to a large part of the population. I remain open to all possibilities of magical breakthrough answers, but experience has taught me to be cautious. Any hot new field attracts an amazing number of dishonest shysters.

      Generally, experience has taught me that if it seems too good to be true it probably is. For 20 years cold fusion has seemed on the verge of success. The believers hold annual conventions. I was excited to read a few years ago about a promising approach using cavitation that was about to be demonstrated. When I recently checked back on their progress I found that the inventor had been disciplined for falsifying reports.

      As an investor, I have the challenge of sorting through all of the conflicting and exaggerated reports and winnowing out the ones that seem to be real. If I’m too skeptical, I’ll miss the real breakthroughs. There are lots of urban legends out there about inventions that were suppressed by big corporations. Generally the powerful people can block government support, but they can’t kill good ideas. If somebody really knows how to make a car run on water, they will soon be selling it, not just posting it on youtube. I’ll happily put up the capital.

      Addicts are often in denial about their problem and global warming denial is common. Certainly, predicting the weather is at best an inexact science, but future generations will know who was right and curse us if we fail to act. The stakes are very high.

      If you’re skeptical about global warming, please read on. It doesn’t really matter if global warming is real, because fossil fuel addiction is killing us in many other ways: Pollution, environmental destruction, dependence on politically unstable sources, mounting debt and rising costs make it urgent that we break our addiction. If we don’t, we will surely have wars in the future over who gets the remaining resources. China is already booking long-term contracts for oil supplies way into the future.

      The world will never actually run out of oil. It will just get more and more expensive and environmentally destructive to extract the remaining supply. Our addiction started with the low-hanging fruit: Oil literally squirted out of the ground and oil prices were sometimes cheaper than water. As we learn how to economically harness the renewable energy sources, they will get cheaper and cheaper while fossil fuels get more and more expensive. A wind, solar or geothermal power plant may be more expensive to build now than a fossil power plant, but the future cost of fuel will be zero. The cost to fuel the fossil plants over the next 30-years will become astronomical.

      Fossil fuels were once so cheap that we quickly developed wasteful ways that made us addicted to them. Now that the easy deposits have been depleted, it becomes more and more expensive and destructive to extract them from the earth. As the world population grows, the effects of the pollution they produce become more and more destructive.

      The cost of controlling these pollutants is growing every day. Mercury has poisoned our fisheries and acid rain from sulfur has killed forests and lakes. Acidified oceans have damaged coral reefs all over the world. Oil sands, shale mining and mountaintop removal pollute our water and leave a wasteland in their wake. Like a drug addict whose arteries have collapsed, we have to resort to more and more painful ways to satisfy our craving.

      Fortunately, there are excellent renewable replacements for fossil fuels, which have not been developed, mainly because of bad public policy driven by powerful coal and oil interests. The renewable technologies will someday be cheaper than fossil fuels if we can just get the politicians to stop protecting the fossil fuels with massive subsidies.

      The voters too, have been targeted by massive PR campaigns like the warm and fuzzy clean coal ads. Organized PR campaigns to discredit global warming are waged by the same firms that previously sowed doubt about the connection between cigarettes and cancer. A $10,000 reward has been offered by one of those firms for writing anti-global warming research papers!

      Back in 2003 I read a book called The Party’s Over, that opened my eyes to our uncertain future as our supply of cheap energy runs out. Peak oil books like The Long Emergency and The End of Suburbia had me really depressed about the world’s future. Gradually, as I researched the solutions, I realized that peak oil was a blessing in disguise. Our careless waste of energy has set the tone for careless waste of everything. By rethinking our lifestyle for efficiency and sustainability, we can actually live better, more satisfying lives, without ruining the planet for future generations.

      The light of an incandescent light bulb is only 3% of the energy in the coal burned to light it. The other 97% is simply wasted as heat. Surely it will be fun to rethink that wasteful process and transform it to something clean, healthy and sustainable. We don’t need to suffer at

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