re: #487 Fozzie Bear

Very little electricity is produced with oil, which is what we extract from tar sands. (Admittedly, a lot of coal is used for electricity generation, but it’s easier to replace power plants. Electrical generation technologies are interchangeable and retrofittable. Not so much with vehicle fuels and engines.

The technological innovation we really REALLY need right now is much better batteries. If we can figure out how to store an electricity in more efficient ways than we do now, we will leap forward technologically as a culture. It’s the focal point and the bottleneck of technological innovation now. We know how to do a LOT of really cool things that we can’t put into practice yet because of that missing ingredient.

I watched this show last week about batteries. There’s apparently some tech out there that’s really ahead of what we see now commercially available. Problem is some of it is held up in patents and the patent holders are being stingy.