It's a simple word, really.

But few practice it.

This failure, incidentally, is partly because nobody learns about it any more, but in those who did, it's an intentional act. 

It is why we're in this economic mess.

It is what is stoked by the hard-core partisans on the left and right.

And it is what people like Limbaugh, Hannity, Maddow, Mathews and others pray to their favored deity you never figure out, because the day you do their entire little empire crumbles around them.

Discernment is about accuracy, not popularity.  It is about depth, not surface perception.

It has been said that great minds debate ideas.
Mediocre minds talk about events.
Small minds attack people.

Labels are so much fun, aren't they?  Faggot.  Nigger.  Racist.  Homophobe.  Anti-semite.  Communist.  Marxist.

But one must discern.  That is, one's ideas may be Marxist, but a person is not Marxist.  And note carefully: That one particular idea someone has is Marxist does not mean the rest of what they believe or know is. Find their error of logic, discuss, debate and convince and suddenly you can't call them names any more.

Of course there are those who refuse to look at ideas, and instead label people.  It's easier, you see, as you don't have to practice discernment.  You only need to see a T-shirt, the color of someone's skin, a cross, pentagram or Star of David around someone's neck.  You need only observe dreadlocks, a pierced nose or tattoo. 

Do recall that Einstein was considered "slow" by some early in his life.  There might have been a discernment problem there, eh?

We have become a nation that is apparently incapable of this function, and that's a problem.  And this is an indictment that deserves to be leveled at both the left and right.

For literally two years we have heard that the Tea Party is a "Nazi" organization, that it's a bunch of "white boys who hate blacks", that the Tea Party is all "gun-toting rednecks" and other similar charges.  Yes, there are probably people who call themselves "Tea Partiers" who have committed various offenses, including serious felonies.  I recall news stories trumpeting that this guy was dealing dope, that one was engaged in some sort of kiting offense, and there was even an allegation of criminal sexual conduct in the news at one point. 

But that there are bad acts committed by individuals does not mean that the ideas embodied in the Tea Party are evil.

That fact certainly didn't stop the left from making this claim on an incessant basis literally from the time of Santelli's Chicago Scream.

But now the shoe is on the other foot.  No less an authority than the Oakland PD said that "about 100" black-clothed violence-loving jackasses showed up out of a crowd estimated at 10,000 in Oakland.  They committed a few acts of vandalism but were stopped by the protesters in the main (and video of this has been posted; it was also shown live from news choppers hovering over the scene.)  Just as telling on the 3rd there were multiple reports of demonstrators returning to where some of these thugs had committed vandalism helping to clean it up.

So does a 1% "infiltration" by these thugs make the entire demonstration "violent" or "violence-loving?"  Well, if you're the right wing it does. 

Similarly there is an alleged thug who demonstrated with the Ft. Collins folks and is now sitting in jail on an arson charge.  The newspaper says: "Arrest papers available to the public do not connect Occupy Fort Collins to the arson fires, and police made no connection between the group's protest and Gilmore's arrest."

The right wing, of course, says no such thing.  A quick Google search shows multiple "titles" claiming "Add Arson to Obama-endorsed #Occupy Activism."

Smearing political opponents is nothing new in America, but it is especially galling coming from the same people who themselves complained (and rightly so!) when they were identically smeared over the last two plus years. 

The problem is that their smear is no more valid than it was when the left wing ran the same crap against the Tea Party.

Indeed, this afternoon there is one particular right-wing agitprop who was all but issuing threats that I'd become "irrelevant" if I don't decide and declare that the "Occupy" movement is what the hard right wants you to believe about it - not about individual acts either piggybacked or even unassociated with the protests, but about the protests themselves and by association everyone in them.

Let's remember that it wasn't that long ago that I had the same slurs and "threats" made against me by the hard left when we were all told that the "Tea Party" was behind Giffords' shooting.  You do remember that charge -- later proved entirely false and baseless in the fullness of time -- right?

Well for those of you who don't remember that I'm an equal-opportunity clue-by-four applier to those in the media and blogosphere who run this sort of baseless garbage let me remind you of my lead story on that event:

Using the actions of someone who is clearly disturbed - the gunman was, from the results, not interested in only shooting Giffords as he targeted anyone in the vicinity - in an attempt to foment political fervor is both unhelpful and exactly how you take a nation from Freedom to Fascism.

Those who attempt to do so must be shunned and permanently turned aside, without exception and irrespective of which side of the political aisle they may hail from or argue for.  Not only are such attempts wildly destructive to our Republic and inherently evil they also are outrageously disrespectful to those who have been injured or killed today.

And this is what I later wrote as more became clear surrounding the events of that day:

It took only a few hours for the radical left to literally infest the entire Huffington Post with what amount to a litany of lies.

....

Jeff Biggers:

.....

"What is clear to me, at this chaotic moment, is that no one should be surprised by this turn of events. The bullets that were fired in Tucson this morning are the logical extension of every bit of partisan hatred that came spewing out during the last election, in which Gabrielle Giffords---a centrist, representing well and faithfully a centrist district---was vilified and demonized as a socialist, a communist, a fascist, a job-killer, a traitor, and more.

Anyone who uttered such words or paid for them to be uttered has his or her name etched on those bullets

Anyone care to rethink their position that my views on this are not one of discernment and have a partisan bent?  That I expect that people will be judged individually and that if you are going to smear an entire group of people you damn well better be able to prove it -- not by claim but by strict proof?

I want answers.

I want to know who's funding these black-dressed folks that showed up in Oakland.  I want to know because there's a recurring theme here among protests and demonstrations, going back to several examples during G20 meetings, including the last one in Toronto.  There is evidence that some of these people at some of these protests have been intentional plants.  Well all that nice new gear costs money folks, and while it's not exactly "high tech" the fact remains that a bunch of do-no-good dope-smoking hippies don't have the funds to put toward something like that, never mind the very real risk of a prison term.  Who were these clowns?  I know who they are pretty-clearly not -- they're not representative of the people "Occupying" Oakland.

Likewise, I want to know what the truth is about this arson charge.  Arson is a very serious felony; this guy, if he did it, is going up the river for a very, very long time.  But this doesn't fit either; he's a businessman if the news reports are correct, which hardly fits with an "Occupy" motif for setting fires.  The truth will come out on this one, of course; he's entitled the presumption of innocence under the law but the judge was convinced that the bond should be held at a very high level, so whatever might be in the arrest report the judge is buying it -- at least for now.  If you're going to claim that this person is somehow connected to the goals or acts of the actual "Occupy" movement then present your evidence -- thus far that claim is no more valid than that Gifford's shooter was a "Tea Partier" or that "Tea Party ideals" were responsible for her attempted assassination.

We have a serious set of problems in this nation folks.  That the left smeared the Tea Party for the last two+ years is no excuse for the right to pull the same crap now.

It was wrong when they did it and it's wrong when you do it too.

I called the left out on it and I'm going to keep calling the right out on it as well.  If that means both sides send me hate mail, so be it.  I refuse to play this game no matter which side of the aisle it originates from.

We must have a debate of ideas, not people.  I don't care whether the person with a good idea is white, black, Chinese, Indian or Martian.  I don't care if they vote Democrat, Republican or Libertarian.  I don't care if they're liberal or conservative.

I do very much care if they speak out of both sides of their mouth.  I will attempt to debate and discuss if an obvious logical flaw is apparent, but if you display a closed mind and partisan crap I will come after you like a nest of angry hornets and for each straw man you care to stand up I will chop it down without fear or favor.

As just one example of this from the right's set of "charges" leveled against the OWS demonstrators relates to student loans.  The claim made is that "it's your own damn fault for taking on $100,000 worth of debt for a degree that doesn't pay well enough (or at all!)"

Ok, let's examine that.

First, College Debt was made non-dischargable in bankruptcy.  Congress did that at the behest of the banks and it's relatively recent.  This status is unique among types of debt, with the only other type being as difficult to discharge being that for child support.  The common cry from the right is that one has a "moral obligation" to pay all debts incurred.

The problem is that these people are speaking out both sides of their mouth.  Two examples will make this clear.  First is the Mortgage Bankers' Association, which walked on its own building and repudiated its debt, jingle-mailing the keys.  Where was the outrage from the right on this practice and why wasn't that outlawed? 

Remember, it is a moral obligation to pay your debts, especially your mortgage.  Well?

Second, I want to draw a different and much-more damning parallel: Drug abuse.

See, leverage -- that is, debt -- is an addictive drug.  Doubt me?  Ok, if it's not addictive then the Federal Government can stop deficit spending tomorrow, cold turkey.

Who on the either side of the aisle -- left or right -- has advocated, pushed for and demanded this happen (other than me)?  Nobody.  Therefore, the assertion is false.  Therefore, you're forced by basic logic to accept my premise -- it is addictive.

Now let's look at the right's argument on addictive substances.

The essence of the argument is two-fold:

1. Drug addiction is wrong and thus is and should be punishable by prison terms.
   
   
2. Drug dealing is even more wrong and thus is not only punishable, it is more-severely punishable than drug using

Hmmmm....

So therefore the purveyor of a loan that knows, or has reason to know, that the borrower cannot pay should be held more liable than the borrower.

Guess what?  If we got rid of the "special case" educational loan problem, and those loans were able to be discharged in bankruptcy, how many "sociology majors" would have $100,000 in student loans?

That's easy: Zero, just as there were zero before the law was changed.

Why?

Because nobody would loan you the money to go to school unless the lender, in their analysis, believed you could pay -- that is, the loan would not be a harmful drug to you.

Therefore they might determine that you could borrow say, one times the average annual earnings for your particular field of study over four years, provided you got acceptable grades (checked every quarter!)  If not, well, you'd get cut off.

You want to borrow a lot of money?  Ok, go into engineering.  Or some other high paying field.  If you want to study the liberal arts that's fine, but you're not going to be able to borrow $100,000 to do it, as if you default the lender will eat it and thus they won't lend to you unless they believe they're going to get paid back!

At the same time get the government out of the student loan business.  Now we have private loans and they're fully able to be discharged.  Therefore, in the main only good loans will be made because the lender will have skin in the game.

That in turn will drive down the cost of college - a lot.  Like by more than half.  Why?  Because nobody will be able to get a loan for $100,000 to pursue a sociology degree, ergo, it won't cost $100,000 to obtain one.

Is this so difficult to understand?

Not in the least.  It's basic logic.  But if you follow it, then the right's incessant claim that the banksters "did nothing wrong" evaporates instantly and they're forced to admit that the essence of all that happened during this time frame with the abuse of leverage was intentional predation.

Several people at the Pensacola OWS were waving signs about student loan debt and trouble getting a job.  With just five minutes spent explaining this proposed change in the law I had every single one of them I spoke with agreeing that this path represents a real answer to the problem.

That's discernment of where the problem actually lies and then it's communication, conversation and debate leading to conversion of belief through logic, not name-calling and bomb-throwing rhetoric.

That is what we need in this nation folks.

Discernment, communication, conversation and debate and if we engage in it we can obtain conversion of belief through logic.

Yes, it's easier to name-call and bomb-throw, rhetorically and otherwise.  But it's fundamentally dishonest and we're out of time -- we simply cannot afford that sort of crap any more.

For four and a half years I've tried to accomplish this job through the path that begins with discernment, because it is the only way you will ever do anything constructive.  Name-calling is not constructive, nor is the rhetorical and political crap that passes for "debate" among the banal. 

One path leads out of the woods in this nation and brings us forward.  It is not an easy path and it requires effort, but it is attainable. 

Of that I am certain.

The other is more of what we've had: Hypocrisy, lies and smear jobs.

It is your choice to make folks, but here's the rub: The mathematics of where we are as a nation, and where we're headed, is not a debate topic.  It's a fact.  The longer we wait to take the path of discernment the greater the probability that it will not matter any longer -- that events will foreclose that option as a viable path forward, leaving no constructive options at all.

There are those who think hastening or praying for such is a good idea.  You're wrong.  Down this path lies almost-certain ruin.  Only about 1 in 20 "revolts" succeed; the other 19 are put down at horrific cost.  Put another way, as I've said before, for ever 1 George Washington you get 20 Hitlers, and those odds suck.  To those who believe that being an agitprop for same will get you some privileged position history says the exact opposite: Those who participate in the incitement are immediately rounded up and killed by the new dictator as he consolidates his power, as he's well aware that the people who did it before could do it again, this time to HIM!  History thus tell us that it's nearly certain that you will wind up in a shallow ditch with 10,000 of your closest friends and a literal splitting headache as your "reward" for such activity in the event your "provocation" is successful.  That should be something to think long and hard about before you engage in this sort of foolishness.

Discernment folks. 

It's the correct first step, it's the necessary first step, and it's the one you ought to be taking, because it's the only path forward that works.

STOP IT folks.

I'm tired of the partisan crap.

Rubio is ineligible for the office of President.  That's how it is.  I don't care if you like it or not, that's how it is.  It is because his parents held allegiance to a foreign nation at the time of his birth and therefore so did he.

There's no way to cure this other than through Constitutional Amendment.

If you don't like this fix it the right way.  All this BS, strum and furor doesn't change facts - Rubio was born to two foreign nationals; neither was a citizen at the time he was born.  And he was not the child of two people "fleeing Castro" either - his parents came to the United States before Castro took power in Cuba.

In addition to being ineligible he's a damned liar.

I linked a Youtube presentation a couple of days ago by a professor who explained the exponent thing.  It was dry and I bet nobody went and watched the whole series; it was basically an hour long.

Yet if you don't understand this, you understand nothing when it comes to economics and the lies told by both the left and right.  You are not stupid, however: you are ignorant.

That ignorance is intentional.  Our "educational system", our bankers and our politicians intentionally fail to explain the fundamental concept explained in this Ticker for one and only one reason: Once you understand it - truly understand it - you can never fall victim to a ponzi scheme.  Not only that, you will never allow any society you are a member of to fall victim to one either, as you will recognize the inherent danger and demand that they be stopped and the people responsible either locked up or burned at the stake (after a proper trial, of course.)

Ignorance falls to education.  It is why we learn, hopefully, so we become less-ignorant.  As such I was prodded in email this morning by someone who said "you get this well for a non-scientist" and I had to reply in riposte: Ah, but I am a scientist you see....

Anyway, here we go.... pull yourself a nice Espresso and sit down for a short story that will explain why we're utterly screwed if we don't act and why acting to stop the progression of what is going in our economy right now is not an option - it is an imperative.

There happens to be a particular species of pond lily that is extremely prolific.  In fact it grows so fast that it doubles in size through both growth and reproduction in just one day.

We will start with a pond of a surface area of 4096 square feet, or about 64 feet square.  We will place within that pond one lily with an area of of one square foot; that is, a lily that is a square of 12 x 12".

This pond contains fish, which would like to live in symbiosis with the algae and other growing plant material within the pond.  In order to do some part of the pond's surface must be exposed to the air so that oxygen and carbon dioxide can be exchanged, and some part of the pond's surface must be open to the sun, or the algae that make up a good part of the food the fish eat (we will assume they do not eat the lilies directly) can survive.  The lilies will conveniently consume the urea (nitrogen) that the fish excrete, preventing the pond water from becoming poisonous.  So long as this symbiosis is maintained all is fine.  But if this symbiotic relationship fails all the fish will die.

We are the fish, incidentally, and the lilies are debt.

Now here's the question: Will the fish inevitably die and if so how long, in days, will pass before they perish?

That's easy.

On the first day there is 1 square foot of pond that is covered.
On the second, 2
On the third, 4.
On the fourth, 8.
On the fifth, 16.
On the sixth, 32.

Note that on the 6th day just 0.8% of the pond is covered with lilies.  You would not detect any problem on the sixth day, I suspect.  More than 99% of the pond is open to the sky!

Now here's the nasty truth: If you're a fish you're halfway to being dead!

Wide awake yet?  I hope so; let's continue.

On the seventh day 64 square feet are covered.
On the eighth, 128.
On the ninth, 256.
On the tenth, 512.

The pond is now 12.5% covered.  More than 80% of the surface area is open to the sky.  When you hear someone say "we have 80% of our resource left; we can't be in trouble", consider exactly where you are.  Why?  You'll see in a moment....

On the eleventh day, 1024 square feet are covered.
On the twelfth, 2048.
On the thirteenth day there is no surface open to the sky and every fish in the pond dies.

When did you figure out you're in trouble?  Was it on the twelfth day?  Well if so you had literally less than 24 hours to commit mass lilicide or you're all dead!  You literally can't spend one day debating with your fellow fish even though you still have half the surface area open to the sky on that 11th day.

This is the nature of exponents folks.

When it comes to economics we need to consider what the doubling time is to figure out how soon our situation will get intolerably bad.  Math provides us the answer; we can use the natural logarithm to determine time, but most people's eyes fuzz at the beginning of the discussion of "e" and thus I won't explain it that way (those of you who were awake in high school and college math, however, should be perking up right about now.)

Years ago, long before calculators, bankers reduced the use of logarithms to a "rule" called "The Rule of 72."  Simply you can take the growth rate of anything and divide that into 72 to find the approximate doubling time.  So if we have debt growing at 7% a year in the economy we can divide it into 72 and find that it takes about 10 years for the debt in the system to double.  This is an approximation, but it's close enough to do in your head (72 is a convenient number for mental division as it is divisible by both 12 and 6 and 6 of course factors to 2 and 3, so most common multiples can be quickly figured in your head without pencil and paper.)

Now go back and read the lily example again, and remember that when you're one period away from being extinct half of the available resource, in this case the money you earn to pay interest and/or principal on your debt, remains available to you!

Yet even with a fifty percent current economic (in this case) surplus you're just one period away from certain destruction!

Do you see the problem more-clearly now?

All the so-called "economists" (cough-Krugman-cough!) and the various commentators both in the mainstream media and blogosphere either do not understand this or simply refuse to accept and discuss it. 

But it doesn't matter whether you choose to accept that you're inevitably doomed in three days when the pond is 12.5% covered with lilies.  You see blue sky and breathe easily, yet you are literally three days away from certain extinction and your refusal to accept mathematics cannot change what is about to happen to you!  You either start killing lillies FAST or you're dead!

These are facts folks.  They are governed by natural laws that are fixed and cannot be avoided.  I cannot change them, you cannot change them, Barack Obama cannot change them, the Republicans cannot change them.  Nobody can change them.

These facts are why this chart happened:

and why, if we don't cut that crap out right now, we are screwed with absolute certainty.

The willful refusal of politicians and financial types, the latter of whom absolutely know this and the former who have no excuse for not understanding it, to discuss this point clearly when it comes to all matters in the economy is why I wrote Leverage.

We cannot avoid the mathematical facts or their effects.  Unlike the laws of man that can be evaded through bribery and trickery mathematics cannot be. 

You either accept these facts or you suffer the consequences.

One final point and I will leave you to think this over: The World Economic Forum (WEF) said recently that for us to achieve a 3% GDP growth for the next decade we would have to double the total systemic debt.  That is a roughly 7% annual growth rate in debt, or a "spread" of about 4% over "growth".  In order to do this, the amount of earnings from everyone in the economy that will have to be diverted to interest payments will also have to approximately double.  Yet it is the inability to pay that interest (and principal where it is paid down) that is factually known as the trigger for the 2007/08 financial collapse and this growth in debt, at their assumed 3% growth rate in GDP, will produce only a 34% increase in output with which you must pay for that doubling!

We must accept what we have done.

The fact is that if the pond will be covered entirely with lilies on October 31st it is now October 30th.

We have two choices: We either start killing lilies and find a way to keep them from reproducing, even though it appears we have half of our pond still uncovered and all is fine, or we will all perish with certainty.

Sigh.......

Batteries are now "part of the clean-tech boom, with all the dewy and righteous credibility of thin-film solar and offshore windmills," Seth Fletcher asserts in "Bottled Lightning." Righteous? Surely. Credible? Maybe.

Uh, credible, no.

Some commentators worry that we're going to replace our dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on foreign batteriesand foreign lithium. "Bottled Lightning" alleviates at least one worry: By taking us to the salt flats of the "Lithium Triangle" in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, Mr. Fletcher shows us the abundance of the metal and puts to rest any fears of "peak lithium."

Mr. Fletcher is in love with the Volt. After a test drive, he gushes: "The car, in short, is fantastic." And it is technically sweet. But at $41,000 per copy, will it interest American drivers?

Hypesterism is not scientific evidence or supportable.

Look, I'd love to find a solution that works in the "battery" realm.  But Seth (and everyone else!) has two problems he has to deal with (and hasn't):

• Charge acceptance.  That is, how fast can you stuff energy into the battery.  This is largely a function of the battery's effective series resistance while being charged; the more of it the more energy gets dissipated as heat in the battery rather than being stored chemically.  Lithium batteries can be charged at higher rates than other chemistries, but the practical maximum is "2C", or double the amp-hour rating.  Going beyond that tends to do a lot of damage to the cell in a big hurry, reducing capacity dramatically, and this assumes you can dissipate the heat (if you can't you get a fire, which of course is very bad!)  As a practical matter this means that while a 30 minute charge is possible assuming you can find a plug that can deliver the amps necessary to do so, the expected "5 minute fillup" is NOT.  Note that the Chevy Volt has a 16 kWh battery pack in it but can only realistically draw down the pack to 30% before protective actions limit further discharge (cell damage occurs below this level.)  That is, we have about 11kWh usable in the pack, so to recharge it in 30 minutes (assuming "2C" can be done) we'd have to source 22 kW before losses.  That's about 100 amps @ 240V.  That's bad news but it in fact gets significantly worse because as batteries go over about 80% charge their acceptance goes down materially, and as a consequence trying to get the last 20% into them on a "rapid charge" is going to both decrease efficiency significantly and increase the heat dissipation problem.  As a result with losses we probably need around 125 amps @ 240V and we can only realistically charge for 25 minutes, leaving us 15-20% short of "full."
  
  Note that if you have a larger battery, allowing a longer range, in order to be able to charge it in 25 minutes or so your power requirement is going to go up a lot.  Let's assume that we want not 40 miles of range but two hundred miles, and we will accept a 30 minute charge after that (that is, we'll travel for three hours @ 70mph and will accept a 30 minute layover after those three hours.)  Note that this is quite conservative - the average modern car can travel about 400 miles before refueling, so a 200 mile range is actually quite a decrease.  But now we need five times the electrical delivery rate, or over six hundred amps of 240V power.  That's three times the total electrical capacity of a modern home's power feed - per vehicle that is charging at one time.  Exactly how many cars did you say that "filling station" was going to be able to support?
  
  
• Energy density.  Batteries are chemical devices; they perform a chemical reaction called a "redox" reaction, or reduction + oxidation.  But unlike combustion (e.g. a gasoline engine) a battery has to carry its oxygen inside the case where a hydrocarbon fueled engine gets the oxygen from the air.  In the case of burning natural gas, for example, you have CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O.   The total mass of the reactants for this chemical reaction is 12 + 4 + 64 or 80 amu of which 64, or 80% of them, come from the atmosphere rather than being carried in the vehicle. 
  
  In the case of the battery all of the reactants are in the case and the cell has to contain the products and have the other half-reaction (reduction) present so the discharge of the battery can be reversed.  This produces a huge disadvantage for the battery in terms of the amount of energy per unit of mass (and usually volume) for the battery that cannot be reasonably overcome.

These are the realities of chemical reactions folks.  I know there are a lot of people who would love to find a way to "replace" liquid hydrocarbons, but the fact remains that we don't use them due to some conspiracy.  We use them because they pack a lot of energy into a small space and the majority of their reactant mass comes from the atmosphere.

There's no getting around these facts.  Better technology will, over time, improve charge acceptance, but it is going to be hard-pressed to do much for density problem which comes about from carrying the necessary reactants in the battery's case.

Hype must give way to physical and chemical reality.

Ok, if you've listened to Pickens and the Ratigan show, you know that they seem to think that we can fix things with natural gas and perhaps with some renewables.

That will never work.  Nor will drilling here - we can replace some of our demand, but not all of it.  Further, the amount of oil we have is finite.

Indeed, all of the various energy resources are finite.  Even The Sun is finite.  It will eventually run out of fuel and "die."  It just won't happen for a very, very long time.

We have about ten years of natural gas supplies in proved reserves at present rates of consumption.  But "growth" is a nasty thing; it's a compound function, and I discuss this often - compound functions cause trouble, and usually quickly.

Pickens wants to move trucks (at minimum) to natural gas.  Nice sentiment.  But he's talking his book and pushing something that, if we double our consumption - and if we replaced gasoline and diesel we would - the "solution" would only last five years, make him filthy rich, and still leave us screwed.

There has to be a better way.  We need a solution that will last at least a hundred years.

What if I told you that there is one?

It's coal.

But not how you think of coal.

We think of coal as going into a power plant that makes electricity.  But that's wasteful, believe it or not.

Here's the math on gasoline, diesel and coal.

1 lb of gasoline contains about 2.2 x 10^7 Joules of energy.
1 lb of coal contains about 1.1 x 10^7 Joules of energy.

These are reasonably-comparable; another way to look at this is that you need about 200% of coal (in pounds) as you do in gasoline for the same energy content.

Edit: Numbers vary on coal depending on type.  Changed to reflect the most-pessimistic reasonable observed number - 4/1 1:44 pm

We currently consume 378 million gallons of gasoline a day.  At 6lbs/gallon (approximately) this is 2,268 million pounds.  Reduced to short tons (2,000 lbs) this is 1.134 million short tons of gasoline/day, or 414 million short tons a year.  Converted to coal, this is 828 short tons.

The most-current value I can find for distillate (diesel fuel) is 3.794 million barrels a day.  At 42 gallons to the barrel, this is 159 million gallons of diesel fuel.  Diesel contains about 20% more BTUs per gallon than gasoline, but is about 17% heavier at 7lbs/gallon, so if we convert simply based on weight we get close.  So we have 1,113 million pounds of diesel daily; reduced to short tons that's 0.557 million short tons of diesel daily, or 203 million short tons a year.  Converted to coal, this is 406 million short tons.

Add these two and we get 1,234 million short tons a year of coal equivalent.

Why is this important?

Because according to the EIA, again, we consume about 1,073 million short tons of coal a year, virtually all of it being burned to produce electrical power.

How much coal do we have?  According to the EIA the total reserve base - the reasonable commercially recoverable coal, is about 489 billion short tons.  That's roughly four hundred years worth of supply at current rates of use.  If we assume our population will grow at about 1% a year and per-capita energy use remains roughly constant, we should have enough coal to last at least 200 years.

Now stay with me a minute.

Remember, we consume about that amount in coal-equivalent between both gasoline and diesel.

Consider this: There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal, and right now we literally throw it away in the ash pile!

What is Thorium?  It's a fertile material.  That means that when struck by a neutron in a reactor it transmutes via a nuclear process to an element that is capable of fission.  Note that Thorium itself is not fissionable - that is, it will not (directly) split and release energy.  Instead it captures thermal neutrons and turns into Uranium-233.  U-233 is fissile.

There is a type of nuclear reactor that utilizes this fuel cycle.  Instead of the traditional nuclear reactor which uses water as a moderator and coolant (either a boiling or pressurized water reactor) these reactors use a liquid salt.  In the vernacular they're called "LFTR"s, pronounced "Lifter." 

You've probably never heard of them.  But they're not pie in the sky dreams.  Our nation ran one for nearly four years in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  It was scrapped in favor of the traditional uranium fuel cycle we use today because the fuel it produces is very difficult to exploit for nuclear weapons, and it breeds fuel at a slow rate.  The natural process of the nuclear reactions in the core of such a unit produces a byproduct that is a very strong gamma emitter that is difficult to separate from the other reaction products.  For this reason - and because we wanted both nuclear power and nuclear weapons - we built the infrastructure for uranium and plutonium rather than thorium.

Thorium-based reactors have several significant advantages and a few disadvantages.  We have much less experience with LFTRs than traditional nuclear power, simply because we stopped working with them for political and war-fighting reasons.  They use a fluoride salt which is quite reactive when in contact with water, but the reactivity is a bonus in all other respects, because it tends to encapsulate the reaction products (the nasty fission products that you don't want in the environment) through that same chemical process.  It runs at a much higher temperature (typically 650C) than a traditional reactor and unlike a traditional reactor the fuel and the working fluid is the same - there are no fuel rods that can melt and release their nasty fission product elements, as the fuel is dispersed in the coolant.

Finally, the unit is intrinsically safe.  It does not require high pressure; the working fluid and coolant is a liquid at ordinary atmospheric pressure.  This gets rid of the need for high-pressure pumps, pipes and similar materials.  Without the moderator the reactivity is insufficient to sustain a chain reaction, and the moderator is in the reactor vessel itself through which the fuel/coolant is pumped, so criticality is impossible outside of the reactor vessel and inside the vessel the fuel and coolant are the same, and a liquid.  The working fluid is contained in the reactor loop by an actively-cooled plug.  If power is lost cooling ceases and the plug melts; the working fluid then drains into tanks by gravity under the reactor and cools into a solid, as it cannot maintain criticality outside of the reactor itself (there's no moderator in the tank or the plumbing.)  As the fuel is in the fluid, there is no core to melt as occurred in Japan and being dispersed over a much larger area the working fluid naturally cools from liquid to solid without forced pumping and cooling.  This safety feature was regularly tested in the unit at Oak Ridge - they literally turned off the power on the weekends and simply went home!

There are some downsides.  The working fluid requires special metals made out of Hastelloy.  But these are no longer particularly-special materials, being used in other chemical plants where highly-corrosive material is commonly handled.  They are expensive, but then again so are traditional reactor pressure vessels which require high-pressure integrity and thus special welding and inspection techniques.

Why did I just spend all this time talking about LFTRs?

Let's remember two facts from up above:

• There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal.
  
  and
  
  
• We use 1,234 million short tons a year of coal equivalent in gasoline and diesel fuel which is approximately - within 20% - of the amount of coal we burn now.

One final piece of information: The Germans figured out how to turn coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel - before WWII.  This process, called Fischer-Tropsch, requires energy to drive it and is currently in commercial use in some places that have a lot of coal but little or no oil, such as South Africa.  Malaysia also has an operating plant.  Typical operating temperatures for this process are in the neighborhood of ~350C.

This light bulb should be coming on about now: We can replace our gasoline and diesel consumption, plus replace the coal-fired plant electrical generation, and have lots of energy left over - all while completely eliminating the requirement for foreign petroleum from anyone!

Now let's put the pieces together.

We'll start with the same amount of coal we burn today.

We have the fuel energy in the coal, and we have 13x that much energy which we are going to extract from it in the form of the thorium naturally contained in the coal.

Let us assume we consume twice the fuel content of the coal extracting the thorium.  We have 11x the original energy left (once in combustion of the coal, and 10x in thorium energy content.)

We will then use the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn the coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel.  We will be rather piggish about efficiency (that is, presume we're not efficient at all) and assume we put in twice as much energy as the coal contains in fuel content converting it.  Since the process heat from the reactor is of higher quality (higher temperature) than the Fischer-Tropsch reaction requires by a good margin, we can do so directly without first converting to electricity (which would introduce more losses.)

We now have all of our gasoline and diesel fuel, and we also have 8x the original BTU content of the coal left in thorium energy content.

We will then use the remainder to generate electricity.

So what do we have out of this?

A nuclear and physical technology that:

• Replaces all of our gasoline and diesel fuel requirements.  This ends our foreign oil imports.  It also allows us to remove all foreign military activity related to securing that foreign oil.  It is essentially a lock that we can drop $200 billion a year off our military budget this way, and it's not unreasonable to expect that we might be able to cut the DOD in half.  Over 20 years this is at least $4 trillion in budget savings, and might be as much as double that.  Those funds should do nicely to build the plants involved.
  
  
• Continues to use liquid hydrocarbons for light and moderate transport needs.  Sorry folks, there's nothing better.  I wish there was too.  There isn't.  Some day there might be, but that day is not today.  The problems with the alternatives are all found in thermodynamics as a consequence of energy density and those are laws, not suggestions.  The energy and money required to produce a plug-in vehicle or hybrid is, for most users, greater than the incremental cost of the fuel over the entire lifetime of the car.  Hybrid and all-electric vehicles make no sense unless you have no rational way to produce the liquid hydrocarbons.  We do have the ability using the above.
  
  
• Reduces our carbon emissions by the amount of the former oil imports that were burned.  We still burn the gasoline and diesel, but that's in the form of the converted coal.  Since we're only using half the hydrocarbons we used before between coal and oil, our CO2 emissions go down by the amount of the formerly-burned petroleum.  I'm not an adherent of the global warming religion but if you are you have to love this plan for that reason alone.
  
  
• Provides us dramatically more electrical power than we have now, and more-efficiently on a thermal-cycle basis.  Conventional nuclear power uses Rankine-cycle turbines.  This is one reason why they need access to large amounts of water.  Due to the higher temperature of operation these reactors can run combined-cycle generating turbines, which makes practical siting them in places where they are air-cooled yet they can still achieve reasonable thermal efficiency.
  
  
• Is sustainable for two full centuries, even assuming our historical 1% population growth rate and no decrease in per-capita energy use.  Within 200 years we should be able to get fusion figured out.  200 years is a long time for technology to advance.  This much is absolutely certain: There is no other option that is reasonably feasible with today's technology and which has an exhaustion horizon of more than 100 years available at the present time, allowing for our historical population growth and no dramatic reductions in per-capita energy consumption.
  
  
• Is not subject to the same constraints and risks that exist for today's reactors, even though this has nuclear power at its core.  The accident in Japan, for example, cannot occur with these units because they do not require active cooling after being shut down to remain safe.  The working fluid also tends to bind any reaction products, which inhibits the spread of any material if there is a pipe break or other release into the environment.
  
  
• Produces much less high-level nuclear waste than conventional reactors.  Most waste is burned up in the reactor via continual reprocessing on-site.  The final waste product produced is a tiny fraction in volume of that from conventional plants.  It is not zero to be sure, but these units present a much-smaller waste profile than do traditional uranium/plutonium cycle nuclear plants.

The biggest disadvantage is that we've only built one of these reactors, at Oak Ridge, and then we stopped because a decision was made to pursue "conventional" plants due to their dual-use capability.  But the challenges presented by LFTR technology are known, and the ability to build and operate such a plant is not "pie in the sky"; we've performed all of the necessary technical parts of assembling this alternative individually and ran one of these reactors for four years.

Are their engineering challenges in this path?  Yes.  Is it "free energy"?  No.

Can this be made to work given what we know now, at a reasonably-competitive price?  YES.

If you're going to propose something else then show me the math. If you can't, then get on board, because this is the bus that will work.

Incidentally, China and India appear to have figured this out as well; I'm not the only one with a brain.

We had better lead on this or we're going to get trampled.