We need Mota Fuel!

During the depression, many farm tractors were actually designed to, and did, run on pure water. The tractor ran on gasoline until it got good and hot, which their inefficiency guaranteed, at which time a small spigot was opened and pure water poured into the carburetor. The hot pistons flashed the water into steam and the tractor continued to chug along until it finally cooled enough to need gas again.

Also, we've now seen stories about bombarding water with radio waves to disassociate the H2 and O. It actually works, but nobody wants to admit that it takes more energy to do it than is recoverable from the H2 and O produced.

Of course you are correct that these lunatics are not referring to actual scientific fact, but fables of their own devising or, just as likely, a complete denial of reality. We don't need energy. We just don't. If we stopped all energy production tomorrow, our food would still magically float into our perpetually-cool refrigerators, and the light would still come on when you opened the door. We could still run our air conditioning in the summertime and heat in the winter, because those things do not require energy. I see even the global warming crowd has decided that airconditioning is exempt from "cuts" in greenhouse emissions restrictions. How convenient.

Dr. Sanity's essay on "The Consequences of Denial:

• In the longer-term, denial requires a continued compromises with reality to maintain the pretense that "Everything is fine!" or "If only X would happen, everything would be fine!" Eventually, delusional thinking, along with paranoia and its inevitable conspiracy theories begin to take the place of rational thought in those who deny reality for long periods of time. ...

• The denier must then place the blame for the unacceptable reality on someone else and that leads to increased conflict between deniers and non-deniers. Efforts to maintain their denial consumes them and will lead them to escalate their anger and rage as their denial becomes untenable and ever more obvious.

• The denier will begin distort language and logic to rationalize and justify their behavior ... . Eventually, cognitive strategies and rational argument will be abandoned altogether by the denier, because those strategies are not sustainable and are unable to convince others; at which point the person in denial will simply refer to his feelings or emotions as the sole justification.

I think you're right about the vast majority of green extremists. A few leaders of the movement know that this is fantasy but are willing to feed it to accomplish their larger goal of population reduction. Since an energy starved world can't produce enough food or any other necessity to support almost seven billion people the net result is killing off the "excess". If a few billion people have to starve to make the Earth "green", so be it.

The desired result is to reduce the population to "sustainable" levels. The only method that will achieve this is genocide. The fools believe in magic pill, their leaders in mass death.

It's projection, I think. So many British and American lefties were conspiring to carrying water for the Soviets in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and participating in homegrown leftist conspiracies in the 1960s and 1970s, that they've really come to believe this is the normal modus operandi for politics. Further, they've been living in this mode for so long that they've come to believe the only reason their conspiracies don't succeed is because the right-wingers put together much better conspiracies.

Ludicrous, of course. If there were such thing as a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and if it were even one-tenth as evilly competent as they claim it is, prominent American leftists by the hundreds would now be occupying shallow unmarked graves somewhere in the desert instead of tenured faculty positions in publicly funded universities.

For true insight into the sort of Byzantine tangles that pass for thought processes in the American leftist mind, go read the wikibiography of Mark Lane some time.

Ken has it.

Mass death is essentially what they propose. Of course, not for them, the guys holding the clipboards, the enlightened ones. They will go on. It is the rest of us that will perish.

Let me just point out one inconsistency of the environmental movement. High efficiency farming can produce more food per acre than organic farming. Therefore, one acre of land can feed more people. Shouldn't this have a beneficial impact on the environment, requiring fewer acres to be planted to feed the world? Yet environmentalists always favor sustainable (i.e. less productive) agriculture.

Hurumph. It's all about magic beans.

"magic bullet, or stream of such bullets"? Hmmmm. My guess is a space fountain, which allows us access to orbital solar power. Just a shot in the dark.

These radicals don't believe there is going to be any lack of energy at all.

I don't agree. It's exactly the opposite: they know that there will be a shortage of energy and they see this as a desirable outcome.

They are the new Puritans. The old Puritans thought everyone should live ascetic lives for the good of their souls. The new secular Puritans think everyone should live ascetic lives for the good of the ecosystem.

They want shortages of energy because that will force everyone to make do with less. That is their goal.

Before you leave, try a cupcake at (of all places) "Cupcakes" at 2887 W. Broadway. And no I don't own a franchise. But I did walk 3 miles one way for one. Then three back to walk the calories off.

There is, actually, a little white pill that will produce a hydrocarbon when put into water. It's calcium carbide and it produces acetylene. My ancestors used it for their torches when spearfishing cuttlefish. But acetylene is the simplest of hydrocarbons and used this way will only light the night lamps on your horse-drawn buggy.

Sidebar: For decades now, I have been hearing of a very particular conspiracy theory -- that someone (usually described as a small, private inventor) has created a magic pill; you fill your car's gas tank with water from your garden hose, toss in this pill, and voila! you get a cool 50 miles per gallon (or 100, or 150, depending who's telling the story) from straight water plus the magic bullet.

But of course any conspiracy needs a villain; in this case, Big Carbon is frantic about this invention, because it would put them out of business. Even if they sold the pills, they wouldn't make the hundreds of billions of dollars they currently get from fossil fuels.

Whenever people run some version of this conspiracy theory past me, I've started asking for specifics.

Usually, Big Carbon, or whatever villain is involved, is accused of buying the patents and sitting on them. So I always ask for the patent number.

No joy so far.

Actually, the federal patent database is available for search. I don't suppose it would be listed under a keyword like "magic pill" but it ought to be easy to find. Make these loonies do the search for themselves and "get back to you" when they find it.

Let's get those reasons right ..

We can't use nuclear because the cooling tower emit large amounts of "water vapor," a major greenhouse gas.

We can't use hydrogen because it too emits "water vapor," a major greenhouse gas.

We can't use solar panels because they are made of selenium, a "heavy metal".

We can't use wind power because the wind resistance of all the towers will cause the earth to slow.

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