Wizard of Id by Parker and Hart for June 24, 2014

Nuclear cars before you know it

don’t tell the oil companies

Keep telling yourself that, Wiz…

I read somewhere that the internal combustion engine is obsolete and had been for over 50 years. But as long as money is being made from gas and oil we will keep using it.

This gag would have more impact if the strip would pick a time period and stay in it. Tomorrow or next week, they’ll be cracking jokes about computers or contemporary celebrities and politicians.

We need to get back to developing more nuclear power plants.

“I never caused a pregnancy” is such a tempting straight line, but I think I’ll keep my mouth shut.

The switch-over from fossil fuels will happen right after the flying car becomes ubiquitous.

“The population should be 500 million max. As of now there are over seven billion of us. That is 14 times more than there should be. I’ve done my part, I never caused a pregnancy.”.For which the rest of us are extremely grateful..There is no perfect number of people the planet should hold. Thirteen out of fourteen shouldn’t drop dead for some arbitrary goal.

Hey, it’s better than the horse manure they projected they were going to be buried under by 1925. Those days must have been fun, mud and horse manure everywhere…

@Jeff H

Since that certain someone in the pale colored house took up residency, the amount of drilling and oil production in this country has increased substantially, way above other occupants. That someone just also likes to try and explore other avenues of the greener type. Nothing wrong with that…

“build a pipeline – without the slightest bit of concern for safety ".Despite the claim companies do not care about safety, they do. Even if they didn’t care about the lives of their workers, the fact remains that the employees ARE the company, that if people are hurt it is THEM who are hurt and further, accidents cost much money in lost production and legal fees..Quite often someone low down the line doesn’t take safety seriously and gets hurt or killed or hurts or kills others and the company is responsible for failing to convince him or her to be careful, but they ARE concerned..Meanwhile, you and I are using fossil fuel to provide power and food to our houses, hospitals, businesses, government offices, farmers. The question is not whether or not the energy of the tar sands will be used but of whether or not it will be most safely and effectively handled. A pipeline is safer than a railroad, the alternative. Being the thick, nasty stuff it is, I suspect a line break would not go far, not like light crude, but would rather solidify as soon as it cooled upon breaking. Use of a good refinery should reduce smoke from its combustion..Using Canadian energy resources has the benefit that the supply line is not affected by Middle Eastern instability and does not fund radicals. Synthetic fuel produced using energy from renewable sources would be nice but nobody’s doing it yet. You are free to do so..By the way, Edison worked hard to develop good batteries for electric cars (which still pushed the fossil fuel back to the power plant, didn’t eliminate them altogether) but the economics just weren’t there at the time..

I was told someone found one of his old electric cars in a junk yard — decades after being scrapped by its owner — put fresh water in the battery and drove it out of the junk yard..Here is an interesting thought. There are places around the world with access to much geothermal power. Rather than using energy intensive processes elsewhere, some are being moved near the geothermal power plants which are being made. Aluminum is being produced which is not needing hydroelectric or fossil fuel sources to work. This can also be done with iron ore, breaking the iron from the oxygen in the ore, producing pure iron and having a waste product of oxygen, just as plants do..Also, it is possible to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or ocean and separate the carbon from the oxygen using power from other sources such as nuclear, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal. It would be possible to undo much of the damage of the past couple of centuries. We need better energy conversion technology, though. We paid for it with the “windfall profits tax” Carter suggested, but the money was diverted by Congress to other goals rather than developing safe, limitless fusion power. .Such is the nature of politics.

Electric cars with the electric being distributed by wi-fi-like methods. Don’t get in the way of the zapping ray.

are you serious??? You could give every person on this planet an acre of land in the state of Texas. The real problem is that the nitwits all want to live at the same place.

oops, I stand corrected – Texas isn’t as large as I thought – my bad

hahahaha

I had a science teacher that made an impression on me. He said if you have more than 2 children you are doubling the world’s population. Granted it’s been at least 30 years, so I probably have it phrased wrong, but his point was that as long as one woman and one man each only created one life the population would stay static. With people like the Duggars & the Octomom & her litter we need more Clark Kents lol.

There is nothing else to use; at least not on any scale.

Too bad you can’t live long enough to see the results of drilling!!!!!

Hmmmmm! Someone’s been reading the Georgia Stones, eh? I hate crowds; at least I know how to avoid being around too many people!! Perhaps you can be among the first to colonize Mars; maybe, even, kill off anyone who passes the 500 million mark!!

You are not grateful for so many?.Somewhere there may be someone who is not grateful for you. And yet, you both live. A higher standard of living and lower mortality rate tends to reduce birth rate below the replacement level..Further, the problem is not that we live too well but they are not living well enough Many are polluting worse lately as they better their standard of living, but that will change soon.?Please don’t decide they need to be wiped out just yet.

Dumb lib humor.

Earth is our workplace., all of us.Alternatives are being phased in, even if not quickly enough to satisfy you..I know you think they want to run a pipeline just so they can coat the earth from end to end with tar, but being the money-grubbers we know them to be, that makes no economic sense. .A pipeline crosses my property here in Florida. I assume it must have breaks on occasion but don’t know not any and definitely not end to end. .Oil to Jacksonville would be far more likely to spill if carried in tankers and would burn far more fossil fuel in the process. .Personally I favor recovering it — if at all — by a more ecologically friendly manner. Use fission reactions to heat the water to move the tar rather than burning fossil fuel to heat it. Then crack the molecules with more nuclear heated steam to produce simpler molecules without excess carbon dioxide production. ..

FRACKING: fracturing rock with high pressure to improve permiability

How about that?Or paving more roads with it.

Don’t worry, there aren’t really many Christians on Earth.I know I may sound a bit antsy whenever I suspect people are suggesting genocide when they confidently state there are too many OTHERS on this planet, especially when they say there’s fourteen times too many, but I had Cambodian friends whose families were wiped out by just such an ideologue and do hot intend to ignore others with the thought they’re “just talking, just like Pol Pot when he preached Cambodia had three times too many people.”.Yes, the people with technology use more than the people without it. That doesn’t mean either group needs to be wiped out People are the problem but people also produce the solutions if educated and free.

The steam powered cars burned kerosene, fossil fuel or wood, deforestation. The electric cars drew their power from fossil fuel burning power plants and had limited range and long recharge times. Unlike gasoline or diesel which could be quickly replaced and ready to go for many more hours. They were both nice but not as nice as what consumers/users decided to buy and use instead. It doesn’t matter how nice something is in theory if nobody wants it..Thus, existence does not equal practicality. They both still exist but mostly as novelties, although electric is still showing promise, especially if charged by zero greenhouse gas producing nuclear or wind or solar (although those last two still need better energy storage).