I believe in American capability.
American capability takes a lot of energy. I believe that we can be smart with our resources and still maintain a high level of capability.
Protecting American interests worldwide isn’t a small challenge.
An American bomber jet flying westward might depart continental United States airspace and meet an Alaska National Guard tanker over the Pacific to perform an aerial refueling operation. The same bomber might meet another tanker out of Andersen AFB, Guam before performing its mission and returning home. The bomber likely refuels at least one more time headed home.
Worldwide bomber missions routinely exceed 24 hours. The current unclassified record is a 44-hour B-2 bomber mission.
These missions are energy intensive. If the bomber were an 8-engine B-52, it would burn a little more than 4.5 gallons of fuel per mile.
If you believe in American capability, you have to believe in American energy.
Consider many examples, such as defense, agriculture, and heavy industry. We need to continue to have capability.
There are no electric fighter jets. No electric bomber jets. Not yet anyway. The Air Force is working on it. But they’re some years away still. And hydrogen fuel jets could win the competition.
Until another platform is ready, we need to maintain global capability. As an alternative one might think America should only have regional influence. I find that unacceptable.
There are no electric grain harvest combines. When the weather supports continuous agriculture operations, stopping because machinery isn’t ready would threaten the livelihood of American farmers. Running farm machinery through the night when weather supports the operation is a common occurrence—that’s why farm machinery comes with lights. (Note: there are plans for small electric farm machinery.)
If I made American agriculture policy, would I threaten the annual grain harvest by putting constraints on agriculture equipment? I find that also unacceptable.
Our biggest energy challenge might be heavy industry. Think steel and cement production. Heavy industry accounts for 22% of global emissions.
Should we stop making concrete? (Maybe we could switch to longer-lasting Roman concrete.) Should we stop using steel?
Again, I believe in American capability, and that means big energy. But I also believe we can be smart with our resources.
We need alternative solutions. And I don’t just mean green energy. I mean—how do we use less metal? How do we drive less?
We shouldn’t just think of how to do what we already do, better. We should think of how to achieve the results we want, in different ways.
In the short term we are already doing things like replacing the 70-year old engines in the B-52. This was one of the projects my teams worked on previously, and we initially got pushback from uninformed officials. Why would we replace the engines in a 70-year old airplane? When we showed the projected fuel efficiency and economic improvements, the question really became why we “couldn’t” replace the same engines.
In the mid term we need to consider ideas such as leveraging coal to our advantage. I don’t mean burning coal. Humans will look back 300 years from now and wonder why we burned valuable coal. Coal will do more than just provide electricity from heat.
I’ve personally witnessed robots making F-22 wings and high-stress missile components from carbon fiber. Coal-based carbon fiber is on the cusp of industrial reality, and lower cost coal-based carbon fiber could change how we make everything.
Let’s consider just passenger cars. With carbon fiber we can reduce passenger car weight by 50%, while maintaining strength and safety. In the end this would result in a 35% improvement in fuel efficiency just from the weight savings. Or if that same car were electric, the weight reduction would mean significantly increased range before a recharge was necessary.
In the long term we need to bring back rail to compete with trucking and air travel in the United States. This will mean investing in infrastructure that safely supports high speed rail. High speed rail doesn’t burn jet fuel, and it can run off clean energy sources. Better rail infrastructure could transport goods to hubs, with electric trucks (which have limited range compared to their diesel engine counterparts) making final deliveries.
And we need to drive industry production cells powered by nuclear energy. Concrete production driven by nuclear power will support needed infrastructure capability, at a lower carbon emissions rate than the current fossil fuel-based industry.
Just some ideas. There are brilliant Americans working on these projects and I look forward to seeing the results.
I believe that we can be smart with our resources and still maintain a high level of capability.
Thanks for considering my perspective.
May God bless the United States of America.
Postscript.
Pepper update. We can’t move them outside for about another month, as we continue to have hard freeze temperatures into late May. I need a coal-based carbon fiber frame hoop house to move them into!
Break break
I finished a data project this week. My lovely bride said, “how’d you do x?” I said I wrote some Python code to help. Python is a pretty awesome computer language, beautiful in its simplicity. I think it saved 2 months worth of time. She asked how I wrote the code. I told her I used ChatGPT to help. I had to know the distinct characteristics I was looking for, and I had to redirect ChatGPT several times (because I hadn’t asked the right questions yet.)
I still had to change the code to direct it to relevant data for different data sets, and I had to teach myself how to run Python. And Python can do WAY more than what I can think of right now. But AI was really beneficial to me for the last two weeks. If you’re on the fence, I encourage you to give it a try!