Contrafactual history of Jimmy Carter's green space-race
Matt sez, "Sasha Pohflepp created a wonderful counter-factual history of a USA where Carter beat Reagan and created a 'space-race' for renewable energy and planetary engineering. Regine from We-Make-Money-Not-Art has the story..."
The Golden Institute (Thanks, Matt!)
The project asks how visions like these are being created in the public imagination but also how they are being reflected by the economy and by individuals. In the case of weather modification, people are modifying their cars into lightning harvesters to participate in the experiments, both scientifically and commercially. The car presented in the model below is a modified Chevrolet El Camino that has been fitted with a lightning rod and various electrical equipment like variable resistors and capacitor banks to store the electricity from a lightning strike. Drivers are then able to sell the stored electricity at any one of the drive-through energy exchanges, which have opened around the zone.The Golden Institute found a way to modify freeways and harness the energy which would otherwise be lost through braking when a vehicle exits the freeway at a velocity of about 55 miles per hour. Now, vehicles are equipped with magnets. As they exit the freeway at high-speed, the cars are gradually slowed down employing the Lorentz force as they pass through a series of induction-coils. The coils are typically operated by a franchise like Chuck's Café and if used effectively can get the driver a discount on a cup of coffee.
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For completeness sake, you'd also need a large protest movement that tries to persuade the hip young and rich that the side effects of these renewable energy technologies are causing quality of life to deteriorate and aren't worth the benefits...
What would the US look like if there had been a renewable energy "space-race" started in 1980?
Well, the actual space-race started in 1960.
What was NASA like in 1990? That would be the state today.
What is NASA like today? That's what you would have to expect in 2030. A governmental money laundry to funnel money into corporations without having to call it subsidy.
Contrast to reality: many new vehicles are starting to be equipped with magnets and induction coils. As they slow down getting off the highway, the system charges batteries that the car's electric motor can use for future acceleration in lieu of gasoline.
No corporate tie-in designed to get you to spend money at "Chuck's Café" required.
The sad reality is that the President of the United States really has very limited influence on the world unless there's a war. If Carter had won instead of Reagan, the world probably wouldn't be much different at all.
Could someone please do a computer model where America has harnessed the power of rainbows, and the laughter of little children.
Oh, and let's not forget the power of a unicorn chaser!
It's contrafactual all right. If Carter had won we wouldn't have had the economic situation required to fund a space race -- much less a green one.
...but then the soviet union invaded in 1990 and stole all our free energy. thanks for nothin jimmy!
Just think, if Carter had won in 1980, it would have meant that Bush's meeting with the Iranians on the tarmac in Paris was exposed *before* the election. That in turn, would have meant at least Bush going to jail (would Ronnie have plead innocence by stupidity?), and the discrediting of the conservative wing of the GOP 25 years earlier then in our world.
We might even still have glaciers and an arctic ice pack in that world...
Ugh, problems a'plenty for that method of power generation. Cars with giant magnets would also be attracted to the reinforced concrete of the road surface, decreasing gas mileage due to an increase in friction (same as everyone carrying extra weight in their car) and energy lost due to current induction in nearby metal.
And keep in mind, if a 500 Kg were slowed from 60mph to 30mph, and the system was able to efficiently turn all of that energy into electricity (assuming the technology were 100% efficient), the total would be about .0124 KWh of energy, costing (at 12 cents per KWh), about a tenth of a cent. Quite a discount on coffee.
The only way to make this economically feasible is to place them everywhere on the road, slowing down traffic constantly while generating electricity. It would be simply externalizing the cost of the generation to cars (a regressive tax), while choosing the possibly the worst generation method in terms of carbon emissions. (Gas is not horribly bad itself, but in cars it is quite inefficient compared to a stationary generator.)
Actually if Carter had won maybe we wouldn't have had this cult of morons running around worshiping free market stupidity and getting us in all this financial trouble.
Regan, or moreover the politics his administration set in motion, had an insufferable effect on America and is a good root cause for both Bushes and their politics.
And if Carter had won, then fuel price wouldn't be the only thing driving up the price of airline tickets, because that peanut farming coward would have caved!
What about an alternate universe with Dukakis instead of HW Bush?
I'd just like to point out a misconception here: The paragraph about weather modification, while cool sounding, is horribly horribly off-base. Lightning strikes don't actually have a huge amount of energy that's capturable, and lighting rods aren't really a good way to get struck by lightning - they're pretty good at dissipating electrons due to the high surface area to volume ratio and their conductivity, so they end up reducing the likelihood of a certain area getting struck. Hence, why we put them on houses and ground them, so excess charge can dissipate. Common sense would be that the grounded rod would be for directing the charge through a certain wire rather than starting a fire somewhere else in the house, but it isn't quite the case.
@11: I'm glad you brought up the "lightening harvesting," because I was going to ask. My electrical knowledge is quite limited (having some difficulty understanding what you wrote,) but I always wondered why nobody did this. Am I to understand that a lightning rod interferes with the conditions for a favorable lightning strike? Dissipating electrons so that they don't flow as lightening/current? Is the adage that lightning strikes the tallest thing off the ground junk science? If not, what if your lightning rod was the tallest structure within the storm?
Further, I always assumed that nobody harvested lightning because it would overpower the methods we would employ to capture/store it (batteries overloading and exploding, wires melting, etc.) But I'm--obviously--an idiot when it comes to understanding these things. Could you (or anyone else) elaborate more on why "Lightning strikes don't actually have a huge amount of energy that's capturable" aside from lightning rods not being the way to go about it? Or is that the problem itself?
Thanks!
I think a lot of you are missing the point of this fictional, hypothetical "contrafactual" history project. As I understand it, it is not to propose any actual specific renewable energy technologies. Rather, I thought the project was designed to show that had Carter been re-elected, we would have SOME (ANY) workable renewable energy technology by now, that the government would be committed to funding advancement in this sector, and that that the technology would be implemented on a vast and economically sustainable scale. Thus, is a political simulation as much as it is a technological one.
I think you are looking at it wrong. Regan isn't responsible for free market worship, Carter is. Nothing pisses an American off like a line created by price controls, which is exactly what happened during the energy crisis. Instead of letting the price rise, the government instituted price controls, and the same thing that happens any time you implement price controls happens... demand outstripped supply, and you get a shitty product or lines and not enough product. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to exploit this politically. Bonus points if you can make the other guy look like a limp-wristed leftist getting pushed around by various dictators. A little staglation doesn't hurt either.
Of course, Carter really doesn't deserve full blame. Carter was actually in the process of deregulating pretty much everything under the sun, price controls on oil included. He might have been a bit of a dove foreign policy wise, but Iran giving up the hostages wasn't a response to the size of Regan's penis. Carter probably gets more of the shaft than he deserved, but his rather disastrous 4 years (regardless of it was his fault or not) is what lead to the era of Regan.
Carter sucks. He would have not got anything done. He blew the iran hostage crisis which amazingly ended shortly after Reagan became president. Even if he had good ideas he'd have been so screwed up by USSR and middle east problems that nothing would have been done..