All big energy buzzwords.  Calling for more research.

That's what they pulled on us.  The "more research" talking point on climate change.

So let's pull it on them for the next 8 years, maybe 12?  Yes, we are all for clean coal, nuclear, and biofuel, once research and development, which we are funding, comes to fruition.  why we even support fusion research!  

Hehey, let them feel the frustration of the dreaded "more research" talking point.  "Revenge is good, it is very good!"  ("Seinfeld")

Biden is playing for our team.  Get used to the tactics we have to use to put clean coal, nuclear power, and biofuel in their proper place.  The filing cabinet of history.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

What bugged my during this part of the debate was that "clean coal" got mixed in the discussion during a climate change section and got seemingly touted by both candidates as a greenhouse gas reducing technology.  Carbon scrubbing technology and "Clean Coal" technology are two very separate things with one (clean coal) being much closer to a reality than the other.  The best an engineer of a clean coal plant can hope for is emissions made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water with fewer nasty standard pollutants like NOX and SOX and particulates.  Drastic improvements in coal plants in this direction have been achieved and should be exported to countries like China - BUT it worries me that politicians seem to think (or want the public to believe) that this technology will improve greenhouse gas emissions.   Carbon capture and storage technologies that would reduce the carbon emissions from using coal are a long ways away.  

Range41, I agree on the comments you made except for the last one. German has already produced Coal Plants that capture and store it's carbon waste. So, I think that it's only a matter of time before the technology gets out.

What the "debate" shows mainly is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a viable energy policy. And, in the face of the current financial problems, lack of credit is certainly going to curtail the drill-baby-drill clowns.

Howard Wilshire

that Biden, with a little help from the French, had kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.  He has been in Washington for more than 30 years, and this is what knows about foreign policy?  The man is a complete moron.  Now we know why he graduated near the bottom of his law school class and why he had to plagiarize his class work.

"Biden is playing for our team."

You mean the one that wants to send 700 billion of our money to foreign countries to pay for energy.

That her energy policy is "Drill, baby, drill!", not "Drill, drill, drill!", as Biden had so naively suggested.

That cleared up a lot of voter confusion, and also, darn tootin', it showed just how out-of-touch that gosh-darn Obama-Biden ticket is.

Yep, that was a real debate highlight for me.

Plugin hybrids and distributed renewable smart grid energy would get rid of huge payments for oil in record time.  

Nuclear powered tar sand, shale oil, and coal to oil planys would give even bigger payments to multinational oil corporations, like the chinese state owned oil corporation that has bought into the Alberta tar sands project.

We will export our standard of living for oil, to these corporations.  Unless our transportation energy is 90% solar, wind, and biogas power generated locally.  And only 10% liquid fuel.

Plugin hybrids do that on average.  When you commute daily it is on electricity, on longer trips (past the battery range, 20 to 60 miles) you use fuel in the backup generator at 30 mpg.

If you have a daily one way commute under 20 miles and a way to charge up at work, you could use a smaller, cheaper battery pack.  Add another 100 pound pack for each twenty mile range.

An ultralight carbon fiber plugin hybrid like this would average over 100 mpg.  The same techology in trucks and trains would cut that portion of total fuel use.  

Ground source heating/cooling would eliminate heating oil.

There is no more reason to have mega multinational monopoly (many even state owned) corporations holding our fate for ransome.  Why not go local with energy.   No more GHG, war, and so forth related to energy in 10 years.

It's doable.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

They finally found a way to make nukes pay.  At the gas pump.

How much of the price of gas refined from Alberta tar sand oil goes to energy costs?  Maybe a dollar per gallon?  They burn natural gas to power tar sand refining.  Digging up, then steaming the oil out of the sand, then cooking it in a refinery.

So if they build nuclear reactors to supply the steam and electricity to run the digging machinery, well your nuke plants makes a buck off every gallon of gas it provides the power to produce.

Canada has the uranium and the tar.  We will get the gas, at 10 bucks per gallon in a few years.  That's a good investment in a nuke plant!

Of course they copuld do it all with wind too, and microwave plasma drilling.  With hardly any water pollution.  Much cheaper!  but plugin hybrid transportation still beats all other alternatives.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin