Published

1 year ago

December 29, 2024

Alice Rush

If the next four years in U.S. politics is simply a reprise of Trump’s first presidency with its petty corruption, its profound indifference to the well-being of the common American, and our nation’s humiliation on the world stage, we can all count ourselves lucky.

Most of us fear that Trump, now a lame duck with nothing to lose, will leave office in 2029 having:

• Transformed American democracy into an oligarchy of multibillionaires.

• Shielded himself from the rule of law, quashing all attempts to prosecute him for the crimes he committed in his attempt to overthrow of our government following his loss in the 2020 election.

• Consolidated power into the executive branch, upsetting the balance of powers that was put in place at the founding of our republic nearly 250 years ago.

• Eviscerated the Justice Department such that it’s impotent to hold the oligarchy accountable for its crimes. This, of course, is the defining characteristic of the most despicable regimes on Earth, i.e., that their leaders are above the law.

• Completed the job of of destroying the U.S. educational system, rendering our country incapable of critical thinking.

• Withdrawn the world’s largest economy from any effort to adapt to / mitigate climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.

Could it possibly be as bad as our well-founded nightmares? Maybe we’ll get off easy. Who knows?

The Next Four Years in the United States

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

15 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.