Dual metered electric

Problems: Electric companies have to manage to peak demand, causing them to build excess capacity, buy excess capacity, and use more expensive and dirtier resources to meet peak demand. Peak demand occurs during the day when people are at work, school and home at the same time. This, combined with peak heat during summer days is what bends and breaks our systems. There is no ability or incentive to shift any of these demands. Also, electric cars are not close to being economically feasible, so they need to have another way of making their owner money other than gas savings.

Solutions: Have dual power rates, one during higher demand times (such as 9am to 5pm) and thus allow users to make intelligent economic decisions. Most people would put off dish washing, laundry and other items until the night to save some money and hot showers are mostly taken in the morning anyway. An industry would grow up around this to create consumer storage devices (batteries) that could be charged during cheap energy hours at night and used during the most expensive times during the day. If the regulators also forced energy companies to buy back stored energy at a midpoint between the cheap night rates and the higher day rates, people and business would quickly adopt technologies to take advantage of this and help the electric companies avoid build-out for peak demand. Also imagine that you have a fully electric car that you can charge up at night and let the energy company buy back juice if you leave the car in the garage for the day or have more energy than you need to go back and forth to work. Along the same lines, energy companies could borrow energy from your electric car during some peak moments in the day as long as they "paid you back" before you had to commute home.

Unlike most of my ideas, this one is not completely original and I have heard bits and pieces and used them to fuse a good solution here.

Green Cars

Green Cars are too expensive for the open market to buy and until people start buying, you won't get economies of scale. Instead of the government mandating that car companies produce a certain type of car, they should put their money where their mouth is and just demand that they themselves only use green cars in all their fleets. I don't even care if they buy them from Toyota.

Elephant Tusks

Two Problems: Elephants are being driven to extinction by ivory poachers and the people trying to protect them don't have the money or resources to adequately protect them.

Solution: the government or park service should hunt down all the elephants with a tranquilizer gun and remove their tusks while they are out. Sure, the elephants are traumatized a bit and they are missing their tusks, but I presume it is easier to get by without your tusks than to be dead. When elephants have no tusks, there will be no poachers. The government could also decide to sell the harvested tusks for income to further help protect the elephants.

Auto Industry Bailout and Socialized Medicine

Two problems:
1) the hourly wages, pensions and health care benefits awarded to the unions are a major factor in the US auto industry's inability to compete.
2) the Government now wants "universal" health care (socialized medicine).

I propose the US Government take over the health care plans of all American auto workers (including Honda, Nissan, etc). This allows the Gov to experiment with a plan on the very type of subjects that are most for a socialized world. If it works, great, if not, we learn a valuable lesson. In the mean time, we relieve the car industry of a huge burden. And if Honda wants to build more plants in America to get free health care for American workers, good for us and US.

Sell the Space Station

The space station is and idea that is behind its time. It is expensive, of little value and the money could be much better spent in many places (genetics, nanotech, solar, ocean engineering, etc). China is currently spending vast sums of money to join the space club and build its own space station. We are currently teamed with Russia and it is clear they are not playing nice in the world and have little interest in a healthy relationship with us.

Solution: give China our interest in the space station and even the space shuttles. China and Russia are not the best of friends and it would be fun to see them play in the same sandbox, we free up money and rid ourselves of the Russian space slugs.

PuddinHead.