[quote=spdrun]Fossil fuel use per annum per capita in NYC is actually very low as compared to the rest of the country. Shared walls in apartments and houses make for good insulation, and daily travel distances are quite small.
But those things only work in a big city. What we need is a grand-scale project to convert the US economy into one based mostly on electricity and hydrogen produced using nuclear, hydro, and renewables. This should be combined with conservation wherever feasible without reducing comforts. It can be done — the challenges are engineering and financial problems at this point, not questions of theoretical physics.
The idea is to effect positive change WITHOUT reducing comforts.[/quote]
If you include nuclear and especially LFTR (Liquid fluoride thorium reactors) it can be done. The problem is you’re fighting one hell of a fight against the environmentalists because you advocating nuclear and coal in the same sentence. There’ just no way to produce significant base load generating capabilities using renewables. Solar thermal with liquid salt might work in the Mohave desert as a base load generating technology, but you’d have to cover massive amounts of land with mirrors. I.e. like half of the Mohave to replace the west coast current energy demand.
Fusion might be a holy grail but we’re still decades away from commercial use. The ITER in Europe won’t be ready to start experiments until 2019 and the LIFE project in Livermore is still working on component tests.
