Robert Woodward wrote:
I know of one book, _The Last Centurion_ by John Ringo (published in
2008). There are probably others. What is really odd about _tLC_, is
that there was a pandemic starting, IIRC, in 2019 (a really nasty one -
world fatalities, IMS, exceeded 1 billion). Oh, yes, the US presidential administration flubbed the response, big time (I believe the president
was a "Hillary Clinton" pastiche). There was significant turmoil over
the 2020 Presidential election as well.
THE HIDDEN TRUTH by Schantz is a Young Adult set in an alternate reality
where Gore became President. In this reality the White House was hit on
9-11.
President Lieberman got Congress to pass the Preserving
our Planet's Future Act as a monument to the late President
Gore. A key part of the plan to decrease greenhouse gas
emissions and rein in global warming involved a carbon tax
that opponents, like Dad, called the "Gore Tax." Global
temperatures had stopped rising and in fact levelled off in
the years since the plan passed. A strong consensus of
scientists all agreed that the President's action had
averted global disaster, yet some extremists denied there
was a connection between the law and the climate. It was all
just a coincidence and natural variation, they claimed. Dad
followed climate-denier websites like wattsupwiththat.com
where skeptics argued that because carbon dioxide levels had
continued to rise while temperatures levelled off, the Gore
Tax was ineffective. But any number of climate scientists
had models proving just how much worse greenhouse gases and
temperatures both would have been without the law. I'd tried
discussing the scientific consensus and the importance of
saving the planet from climate change with Dad, but he was
just too stubborn to listen to me.
... several chapters later ...
"Do you recall the Whiskey Rebellion?"
I'd read about that in Paul Johnson's A History of the
American People. "Sure. Frontier folk in Pennsylvania
couldn't get their corn to market because the expense of
carting it in bulk across the mountains was too high. So,
they distilled it to whiskey which made it more portable.
But then, the federal government started taxing whiskey
and they rebelled. Washington sent the Army in to restore
control."
"Yeah, that's the gist of it," Uncle Rob agreed. "That's
what gave me the idea. Up and down the Appalachians
there's natural gas wells. Not so many in these hills,
but more up into Kentucky and West Virginia. Part of the
Gore Tax included a heap of new regulations on how to
transport natural gas. The regulators carefully crafted
the rules in collusion with Tolliver Corporation and some
of the other large energy companies who were big campaign
contributors. They engineered the regulations to make it
very difficult for small independents to get their natural
gas transported to market at any reasonable expense. So
most of their wells are idle and their owners are losing
their shirts. It's the same problem as faced those
frontiersmen with all the bulky corn they couldn't
transport. How did they solve it?"
"By distilling it down to a more compact form," I answered.
"You mean chilling and liquefying the natural gas?"
"Sharp kid," Uncle Rob said to Dad. "But, not quite there
yet," he said to me. "Liquefied natural gas, chilled and
compressed to make it more compact is a standard technique.
But, the energy companies and their lobbyists thought of
that. They forbid shipping liquefied natural gas by tanker
truck except for very short distances. And somehow, while
it is perfectly safe and acceptable to truck gas from a
rail depot or a distributor to a customer, when the gas is
being moved the other direction from a gas field to a rail
depot or to a distributor or directly to an end user, it
suddenly becomes too dangerous to transport on a truck.
The upshot of it is, if you don't have a rail spur to your
gas field, you pretty much can't ship your gas in compact
liquefied form which means it just isn't economical to ship."
"So how do you ship it?" I asked.
"You don't," Uncle Rob grinned. "That's the beauty of it. If
you can't bring your natural gas to your customer, you bring
your customer to your natural gas." I was confused. Uncle Rob
continued. "Your Mom and Dad engineered a mobile system in a
cargo container for compressing, liquefying, and distilling
air. It burns natural gas to drive the compressor and chiller.
We truck our rig on up to a natural gas field, and we tap
into what would otherwise be an idle well for a few hours. We
burn the natural gas and collect the liquefied compressed air
into tanker trucks: about four tanker trucks of liquid nitrogen
for every tanker truck of liquid oxygen. We have a small tank
that collects the residue of argon and heavier gasses. Our
production method isn't as efficient as big fixed plants, but
our energy costs are way lower. The small independents are
happy to get a market for natural gas they otherwise couldn't
sell, and we're able to get a steep discount. The rules for
trucking compressed liquefied oxygen and nitrogen are still
much less stringent than for liquefied natural gas.
Danke,
--
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