There actually appears to be a growing realization of what’s happening, increased willingness on the part of people like this person, to start discussing it honestly based on science.

The changes and their effects are now so obvious, that It’s getting very difficult to ignore, without looking like a fool.

Wow!I used to be a Republican; thought I was ‘the last dodo’ (not really, I’ve met others who remember the basic tenets of Republicanism.) How many Republican scientists will it take to influence the non(science)-believers? Especially when they must rail against true geniuses like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Palin?

Paul Douglas is perhaps the most deservedly respected meterologist alive today. He’s been doing state-of-the-art computer models for decades now, and in areas not limited to meteorology. (He designed the first 3D weather graphics system, which Spielberg used in the first Jurassic Park movie.)

He’s been saying for a while that climate change is real. This is the first time he’s actually thrown down the gauntlet — in his usual polite but firm way — in front of his fellow Republicans.

What is he, some kind of Communist Prevert?

By the way, you can see Russia from Alaska…

Heresy and a repudiation of Limbaugh – Paul Douglas’ career is over.

The one question I would ask this fellow is:

If we could shut down all use of carbon based fuels or at least reverse the usage so that we are using these fuels at the mid 1800′s level, does he believe we would go back to “Normal”? Perhaps a little more basic: Does he believe in Scientific determinism, and if so how would the models respond to the first question?

Please, I am not a denier. I want to know more about these projections their root and the data that provides a definitive answer to what I ask. My basis for asking is rooted in Chaos Theory.

Too little, too late.

With respect to what?

Thank you, Peterr.

When I read “The Roosevelts” I was struck that it is not at all about party except insofar as mere mechanics are concerned. Teddy and FDR had similar ‘progressive’ ideas, very different family lives though linked through Eleanor in a fascinating personal web.

We need to latch onto these wonderful public persons who take more account of what is needed than of old paradigms that don’t fit the current state of affairs and are brave enough to take a stand when there is considerable risk to them. That’s how calendars get updated, when the astronomical phenomena don’t fit with the old system.

It is never too late.

Everything. Some examples.

As for global warming, some scientists have said in the past few days that the planet has passed beyond the point of no return.

How much did Peterr have to search to find one little lonely scientist who claims to be R to talk against the whole R establishment, including the oil lobby that funds research and propaganda to prove the opposite. How much money does this guy have to reverse that. How much access to corp media.

I could go on but you get the point.

Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity

There actually appears to be a growing realization of what’s happening, increased willingness on the part of people like this person, to start discussing it honestly based on science.

interesting thing here;

climate research and cooling the planet will CREATE jobs and prosperity, the professional deniers just want the wealth kept where it’s going rather then where it will go, which is more evenly dispursed among the masses

When this kind of thing happens I usually assume someone has caught a whiff of a change in the direction of the wind. Be interesting to follow Douglas’ career from here.

Climate change is sacrificing the good of many species for ambiance of a small group of humans. Selfish, stubborn and dishonest. The watersheds that provide for AG and open environment are damaged. The snow packs are smaller and test positive for pollutants. The endocrine disruptors from industrial chemicals are changing the puberty cycles in mammals.
Humans have destroyed a beautifull eco-system. From the mountains, rivers, plains, atmosphere and oceans. Not to forget nuclear radiation.
Grateful for this news from the right.

I used to live in the Twin Cities and I remember Paul Douglas. He was a bright spot on KARE’s otherwise saccharine news shows at 6 and 10. A stand-up guy with boatloads of credibility. Good on him for speaking up.

Republicans have been battling logic, science and the truth for so long it’s now in their political DNA. It will take several generations at least for the mutation to be excised.

Carbon sinks, reforestation like lumber companies are doing, growing some of your own food, alternative energy, reducing energy consumption all can reduce the problem and extend the planets health.
Never ever give up, ramp up your efforts.

Actually, Paul Douglas is the most respected meterologist alive today, and he’s been talking about global warming for many years now. He’s not exactly obscure.

For someone like Paul Douglas to come out and not only say that human-caused climate change is real but to take his fellow Republicans to task for being in bed with the oil-funded denialists, is on a par with Albert Einstein telling his fellow nuclear scientists to stop making nuclear weapons. He’s that influential.

Well, Mr. Douglas, welcome to the modern Republican Party! He notes that he’s part of a “small, frustrated and endangered minority.” Indeed, as was reported earlier this week, trust in science by so-called conservatives has declined to an all-time low, at around 35%.

The media generally overlooked what should be one of the most disturbing findings in that sociological study for people like Douglas (and for all rational folks everywhere): the decline has been most marked among conservatives with greater education, which implies that this is a group that “ought” to know better but has made an affirmative decision to ignore the evidence laid out in front of them. The study also found that the declines correlate with the Reagan and George W. Bush presidential terms. No big surprise there.

The study also posits that to the degree that modern science in areas such as climate change calls for government policies in response to the shifts identified in the scientific results, conservatives now view science itself as hopelessly politicized — and we all know that the likely consequence is tribalization, with one side championing the results and the other rejecting them utterly. Rational discussion and interpretive analysis becomes effectively impossible. This leaves Douglas in an awkward position indeed, as he’s exposed on a daily basis to information that a large majority of his tribe now explicitly rejects. It’s only a matter of time before the other members of that tribe come to view him as a danger in their midst and seek to expel him, to the extent that they haven’t already closed their eyes and ears to his warnings.

For someone like Paul Douglas to come out and not only say that human-caused climate change is real but to take his fellow Republicans to task for being in bed with the oil-funded denialists, is on a par with Albert Einstein telling his fellow nuclear scientists to stop making nuclear weapons. He’s that influential.

seems to me we still have scientists making nuclear weapons though

climate change is here to stay, our children will suffer the sins of their parents to be sure

Exactly. Don’t be one of the folks who wants to drag everyone else down into their own cesspool of suicidal cynicism masking an underlying misery, just because schadenfreude is their only remaining pleasure.

We have far fewer of them doing it — most of them being in rogue nations like North Korea or Israel. Russia, China and the US actually have a lot less than they once did.

Just because nukes aren’t totally gone doesn’t mean we should all give up right now.

One generation can do it.

So, in another 20-30 years Republicans might return to the world of rationality. Not sure the U.S. has that much time.

What industrial chemicals are doing to our species from NYT today http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general just very hard to mitigate industrial profits for this kind of impact.

It’s what you get when, fifty-odd years ago, the Republican Party’s biggest and richest backers make a conscious decision to inflame various bigotries — racism, homophobia, religious hatreds, sexism, etc. — in order to trick a large number of Americans into voting against their own best interests, simply to keep from having to pay taxes or obey laws.

It was a calculated business decision to stop being the Party of Lincoln and start being the Party of Strom Thurmond.

But it’s gone on so long that moral Republicans like Douglas, who used to be fairly common, are now so rare that it’s newsworthy when one of them says something sane and sensible (just as Joe Scarborough stands out with his condemnation of his fellow Republicans over their treatment of Trayvon Martin’s murder), as the GOP’s embrace of bigotry in the name of big business has warped its collective thought processes to the point where even the Republican elites like Peggy Noonan and Tucker Carlson are increasingly incapable of rational thinking, much less discussion.

100,000 years, in one estimate as to the time it would take the word’s oceans to reach the equilibrium state that preceded climate change. The oceans matter also in this very complex, non-linear dynamical system. And I saw no predictions that it would actually happen.

Tobacco interests lied / lie to protect profits. Big Oil lies to protect profits also. As the evidence of cancer from smoking became obvious America was brainwashed, by corporate media campaigns, misrepresenting fact. The commercials from energy interests are no different in scope and lies attempting to protect a business model which leverages America into wasting 80. cents of every dollar spent on gasoline, utilized in the woefully inefficient Internal Combustion Engine, (trillion of dollars of economic value squandered) all in spite of the credible evidence, evident to the entire world, except to the modern day slave-owners?

It’s too bad that Henry Ford’s engineers believed their job ended at the tailpipe. And we have grudgingly pulled the auto industry out of that attitude, but only so far as they could get away with it. In a couple of generations of auto evolution, the controls over emission may come off, and we will be charged more for that “Discovery”.

Yup, them social issues become red herring wedge issues to distract from the systemic rape of a nation by oil. How any responsible policy maker would perpetuate the wasting of .80 cents of most dollars spent on gasoline is suicidal.

America wastes over a billion dollars a day. No servitude here????????????????????

Nothing in life can waste 80% of its potential energy and sustain itself. Congress is again, protecting servitude/slavery as it did prior to the slave owner’s challenge to the constitution/union.

WWJ-AM, Detroit’s all-news station, uses Accu-Weather. One of their meteorologists, Dean Devore, said this about global warming to the morning show hosts during the recent spell of unseasonably warm weather: it’s not clear whether humans are responsible for global warming; and besides, we’re overdue for another Ice Age.

Ford’s model T ran on alcohol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T

The engine was capable of running on gasoline, kerosene, or ethanol,[15][16] although the decreasing cost of gasoline and the later introduction of Prohibition made ethanol an impractical fuel.

And?

I suppose they’ll have to shoot him now. After all, nothing is more Republican than killing the bearer of bad (and truthful) news.

Quite true. A half century ago, though, it was the Republican Party elites who made the decision to seek the votes of the most backward-looking and fantasyworld-dwelling Americans. And now, having sown the wind, they’ve reaped the whirlwind as this segment has completely captured the Party.

Twenty-five years ago, I had a fair number of Republican friends, but I now can’t really think of any; most have abandoned their old party out of distaste/disgust for what has become of it, while the others who’ve stuck with the GOP have become impossible for me to talk with — short discussions inevitably lead to situations where it’s all I can do to refrain from sputtering with rage at their stubborn refusal to incorporate facts that might contradict their pre-established worldview (itself anecdotal support for the study cited in my earlier comment).

Rational Republicans who are willing to accept evidence from the physical world around them are a dying breed, sadly. The damage done by their successors in the GOP, on environmental issues alone, will affect all of us, in the U.S. and across the globe, for generations to come. It’s a legacy that Douglas and others like him probably won’t be able to stanch.

Don’t know the truth . . . but Ratigan (in one of his energy segments) stated that we lose almost 80% of our electricity in the transmission process. Is this a double whammy?

I read the full article and the author is only half right. I am a Chemical Engineer so I have a different perspective on the problem.

I believe climate change is undeniable. If you read the literature, you’d think that if we only removed the green house gases from the atmosphere the problem would be solved, but that’s not true. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is always conserved. This implies that we can neither create or destroy energy. There is a constant amount of energy in the universe. What we do is transfer the energy between states of matter. For example, you turn on the burner on your stove. The element gets hot. If a pot is on the burner containing water, heat is transferred from the element to the pot and into the water. The temperature of the water rises. If you turn off the burner the heat from the water is transferred to the atmosphere. Most people assume this heat just disappears. It doesn’t. It actually raises the temperature of the atmosphere, though by a very small amount. Now think about do that by 7 Billion people and you get the picture. Heat is going to build up in the atmosphere. So how does that heat get out. It get’s out the same way the Sun warms us, by radiation. The higher the temperature of the earth the more it radiates into space. Think about this. Everything we do generates heat. Just being alive generates heat. The body temperature is 98.6 degrees. Heat from your body warms the atmosphere. Add to that burning fuels at an every increasing rate and you can see what must happen. This will happen even if you don’t take into account greenhouse gases.

Think of greenhouse gases like insulation. This just makes it harder for the heat to get out. We’re right to be worried about greenhouse gases, but our thirst for energy is just and probably more important.

So what can we do? First of all the internal combustion engine sucks! Most of the energy goes out as heat to your radiator and you tail pipe. Electrial engines are much more efficient. That means electric cars that just run on batteries or fuel cell cars greatly reduce the amount wasted energy. We need to do a lot more research on how we generate energy. Currently we generate electricity by generating steam and turning a turbine. This is also an inefficient energy generator, but its a lot better than what goes on in our gas powered cars. We need to use nuclear generated energy because it doesn’t generate greenhouse gases. We need to do much more research into nuclear fusion based energy generation.

This means we need to put a lot more money into energy reasearch. We need a lot more engineers and scientists to work on these problems. The President talks the talk. He needs to walk the walk.

how do you ignore this for instance:

“Ice cover on North America’s Great Lakes–Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario, and Erie–has declined 71% since 1973, says a new study published in the Journal of Climate by researchers at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.”

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/

The cynic in me mumbles too little, too late.

I fully expect America to become even more the nation which turns it’s back on science, common sense, and the will of the people, as we sink slowly but surely into kleptocracy and third world America. Obama was our last, great hope, and he was voted in to turn the tide, but he instead closed ranks with the power elite and sold us all down the river.

Boy, I really am in a sour mode today.

As we continue to fight healthcare (right to actually live) expect the atmosphere to be reduced by 98.6 degrees times ‘x’. I think even scientists are a bit fearful of the rapid right who endorse the ‘go forth and multiply’ principle . . . so speaking of population reduction/control is a no-no in many circles.

I wasn’t endorsing population control, but it would actually help. The problem is going to solve itself. As the temperature rises, we are going to see more new virsuses. Eventually one of these is going to be completely drug resistant and will wipe out a large chunck of the population.

One of the great truths of science is the principle of equilibrium. When something gets out of wack in nature a force rises to counteract it. All these problems will solve themselves. The question is if we will survive it.

As a mechanical engineer, I’m glad to see you here.

Having worked for the DOE, I can tell you from first hand experience that research into fusion energy has been going on almost continually since 1947, and we have made significant progress, but much more work remains to be done. IT may not serve as a solution within our current time frame. But fusion energy is the golden bullet, it will let us leave our solar system.

The work on thorium reactors done at Oak Ridge back in the 60′s actually offers more hope as an immediate solution (still requiring decades of work). China is now pursuing thorium reactors for their country and will probably get there ahead of us. Our current reactor technology was specifically derived from the bomb as a means to generate the material required. We are going to run out of the required uranium rather quickly, it’s rare, thorium is not rare (but it cannot be used to make bombs.)

Hydrogen as a fuel generated from wind or solar power and used in our vehicles can replace gas. Obviously, fuel cells and electric motors would be way more efficient, but combustion engines can be modified to burn hydrogen/oxygen.

The problems are obvious, the solutions are out there, but our country lacks the political will or even the free market solution to do the obvious. Our political parties have been bought by the current kleptocracy who only desire to only maintain the status quo (be that in power, or banking or health care, or any other number of totally screwed up, bailed out, failing industry, and will dumb down or just ignore the people to get them to go along. I don’t see our country making the effort, we are wiring out our middle class, wiping out our ability to make engineers with massive student debt. We are no longer a meritocracy where people with good ideas, and good business can live the American dream. In fact, the “American dream” now happens in Europe more often than in the US.

I’m still in a rather sour mood. But we need people like you to keep on slugging away at this so, thank you, and keep it up.

With respect to the oceans 100,000 years. In the meantime, a different kind of equilibrium may arise. After all, equilibrium that is favorable to humans is not written in stone. And, it may happen anyway, even if we didn’t insert our processes. Perhaps even, we may have avoided an even grater catastrophe. What if the butterfly did not flap it’s wings and a huge tornado arose?

I understand that; it just speaks to the rather sad state of humanity right now. Here in our own country, the fundamentalists want not only multiplication (we have to maintain our white majority), but seem to value life only until it meets the atmosphere. After that, you’re on your own (which is okay if you are healthy and wealthy). It seems, too, that there is an agenda that opposes teaching the under-educated, third world citizens the value of birth control (population control). As you said, I expect with bioweapon research ongoing, and our current predilection to overuse antibiotics, we (or our children) will face the consequences of disequilibrium you predict.

Even an electric-powered vehicle will be very hot somewhere. The solution is to reduce the number of heat-producing vehicles, which means modifying behaviors and either staying put or using mass transit.

When tires wear, the rubber/synthetic burns, leaving itself on the pavement where it quickly evaporates, joining everything else we call air.

Our lower atmosphere doesn’t extend very high up, not much more than the distance from your home to the mall. It’s all there is that supports life. It’s always been dense, but it used to be thinner, more breathable, before petroleum oil was discovered. Huge, permanent clouds of pollution have slowly been forming, blocking light, and acting as magnets for more particulates, growing further but not farther.

We can’t clean the atmosphere. We’ll have to adapt and hope and pray we don’t turn into Venus.

Dean Kamen (Segway inventor) has been helping by inventing the Slingshot.

It’s a very old story and the knowledge about disequilibrium is ancient. Thucydides traced a typhus outbreak in Greece to the copper smelting in Upper Egypt, which Sophocles transformed into the Oedipus Tyrannus (that begins during a deadly plague).

I don’t think it’s a good idea to couple planetary equilibrium with that of a species, or even more so a particular group of a species. A certain hubris sets in.

People want to be mobile. So limiting movement will never work. The question is whether we can do so efficiently. Gasoline vechiles have about a 15% efficiency. Diesel vechiles have about a 20% efficiency. Electrical vechiles have about an 80% efficiency. Efficiency is the amount of energy consumed that actually powers the vechile.

Something nobody ever seems to mention is that are electrial grid sucks. We get about 35% efficiency. In Japan they get about 80-90% efficiency. That means 65% of the energy that we use to generate electricity goes out as heat. A lot of this is wasted in our obsolete electrical infrastructure. The whole thing needs to be redesigned and rebuilt. Much like our crumbling pipe and highway infrastructure, this is going to cost trillions of dollars. Yup, a really good time for the Republicans to be crying about austerity.

Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee before we become literally a bannanna republic. No matter what the Republicans say, prayer ain’t going to get us out of this one.

Yes it is a double whammy, predicated on ignorance. Ratigan also placed the real cost of a gallon of gasoline at about 14.00 per gallon when we factor in all the factors oil does not want factored in!!!!!

And?

Hydrogen…. the most abundant element in the universe???? Instead America is raped…

Dam right about that! When corporations buy own government, all americnas are reduced to slave status?

A few points. Fifty years ago they were saying fusion was 50 years away. If you ask scientists today, they will tell you we are 50 years away. This is going to have to be speeded up.

As far as space travel is concerned, unless we figure out how to get around Einstein’s theory of relativity, we’re not going anywhere. The speed of light is as fast as we can go. Even if we could travel at the speed of light to get to that speed would require 1/2*m*c**2 of energy and since according to Einstein E=m*c**2, at 100% efficiency we would have to consume 1/2 the mass of vehicle in a nuclear reaction to reach the speed of light. Not pratical. Of course in theory, it might be possible to convert the energy back into mass to slow down the vechile (the ultimate regenerative braking).

We better hope we can invent a warp drive or there will be no “Beam Me Up, Scotty!” moments.

Totally agree as to the timeline of fusion – it will not be a player in the coming crisis. All I implied with the golden bullet is thus – all of the energy on our earth is derived from the sun. When we finally put a sun in a bottle – we are free to leave the solar system assuming there is enough hydrogen in free space to gather it up and burn. It would not be fast – it would a glint in the eye of possibility is all.

As to the rest – the problem remains. We have have passed a tipping point where we could have arrested the worst effects of global warming – but even assuming that’s happen we should be moving full speed ahead to implement wind, solar, thorium reactors, a modern energy grid.

How can we do this? How can we afford it? Well, when Wall St was bailed out we spent more in one year than all total expenditures by our country COMBINED:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/bailout-costs-vs-big-historical-events/

How did we afford that? And, by the way, what a tragic waste. We could have done ALL that I listed above, and fully funded SS, gave everybody decent health care, and sent all our kids to college.

Even that above figure is now out of date. Recent total expenditures of all types have reached $29 trillion dollars. Just think what we could do if we made that kind of national commitment to fixing our country rather than bailing out a bunch of crooks on Wall St. Just think what we could do if we got out of senseless wars, cut our military budget to realistic levels, raised taxes on the rich and corporations, cut tax breaks to oil companies, quit robbing SS with the payroll tax cut, and let everyone buy into Medicare.

I agree, on the fusion front. As for the space travel at warp speed, who knows? I doubt we’ve learned everything there is to know about how the Multi-verse is constructed and I believe we have some very interesting and maybe even shocking surprises yet to come in that realm.

Obama was never the solution and was never anything more then what he is a shoeshine boy for the Oligarchs and their Plutocracy.

You numbers are dubious.

Please provide references (links).

Out electrical grid is privately owned is it not? Is the grid a triumph of capitalism or do we the taxpayers have to bail out another private enterprise?

All you had to do was google it. Lazy is a good adjective for you.

http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/efficiency-of-the-us-electrical-grid/

Private companies are not going to put up the investment needed. Only government can supply that kind of capital. Maybe, through a low interest loans or the government get paid back from the savings. By doing this you will triple the amount usable energy from the same amount of fuel.

Leaving this up to private industry and the “free” market with maintain the status quo. Utility companies don’t care. They have a captive market. They make a profit in the status quo. Why put up all the capital when you can just run what you have in the ground. If anything all the additional supply of electricty will supress prices.

We sure aren’t interested in getting there. What was the cost for the particle collider at CERN? I think it was less than $10 Billion dollars. Originally the US was going to build that in TX, but the Republicans said it was a waste of money. They are willing to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars on a star wars missle defense system, that in my opinion has no chance of being effective, but not a dime on research that has the potential to unlock the secrets of the universe. Of course, if you could convince them that it would lead to a better bomb, we’d be building 10 of them.

BTW the numbers on grid efficiency are pathetic and obviously we can do a lot better. That’s what happens when you let the free market loose. It doesn’t make the best decisions only the most expedient ones.

Quite a shock, huh? Hard to believe? After all we are Americans and we are the best at everything or so we are told. We are getting our lunch eaten. We spend our time arguing the culture wars and worring about replacing our constitution with the Bible, but don’t WORRY! Just let corporations run free and trust the “free” markets and it will all work out in the end, RIGHT?

Think of the politicans and the 1% as magicians. They want you to look at the left hand when the trick is being performed by the right hand. It all about diversion.

I see this is still running.

The link you provided is weak on it’s own links. Just a table and additional links in the Comments.

What many people do not understand is that resistance is not the only way we lose efficiency, but radiation also figures in.

The wavelength of 60 Hz is approx 3100 miles. A 1/4 wavelength, a figure used in many antenna designs, is 775 miles. So long distance transmission over a couple of hundred miles gets into this problem. Engineers mitigate this by running the lines an a 3 phase configuration which provides for some degree of field cancellation, but the losses are there.

In the 70′s, an attempt to get around this problem, when the BPA was called upon to provide power to the LA region, they came up with a high voltage DC line, which gets around the radiation problem, with sufficient efficiency gain to offset the conversion to DC and back again.

Why the long lines? For LA it is simple. We have the power here in the NW. But there is another one and that is the peak power demands.

We have to design electrical supply to meet the peak power demands and if each area is responsible for meeting it’s own, huge over design demands are imposed. But what if, say, NY peak is not the same time as the West Coast peak? We could then trade power so that systems at or close to minimum could share there excess with NY and visa versa, which is what happens, ergo, long transmission lines.

If you look at Japan, for instance, they don’t have that problem, with the islands essentially lined up N-S therefor in the same or nearly the same time zone. So peak sharing doesn’t work and the demands for excessive line length lessened along with radiation loss.

There is the lack of attention to detail which increases resistive losses for sure, but it isn’t the only one. And, of course, the energy conversion factor comes into play. Japan has (or had, it will be interesting to see what now happens there) nukes as the power source. We use fossil fuels. mainly.

Just some thoughts from an older engineer.

A post script: The DC line was conceived to be able to raise the voltage levels on the line to extremely high levels. I don’t recall the number but knowing that Power P is equal to voltage V x Current I , and that resistive looses are a function of current,(I^2xR) the DC line produced an efficiency increase from two sources. Cut the current in half, cut the power loss by 4.

I provided one link. Google it and you’ll get all the references you want. Okay, maybe, the Japanese have a special situation, but I don’t see why we can’t double the efficiency. Double the efficiency cuts fuel usage in half. The energy we are losing eventually is sent off into outer space. It does nothing but heat the atmosphere and add to global warming. Money spent here is a win-win situation.

All of our infrastructure has been around for decades. We haven’t really invested in it since the 70′s. That Regan revoultion really did wonders for the country. Now we have a crumbling infrastructure and the Republicans want to go on an austerity kick. Think we’re going to be in the same postion at the end of this century that we started at in the beginning? I certainly don’t.

Well, the losses are real, and while excess transmission losses can be mitigated, they come with their own tradeoffs. Simply transmitting power using AC increases the insulation factor by √2, that is, to safely handle 100VAC, you must insulate for about 140+ volts. No way around it so long as you use AC. You can decrease IR losses by using 140VDC instead of 100VAC since we already insulate for that.

Edison backed DC, I believe it was Westinghouse that championed AC. Perhaps local power down to the neighborhood level running DC is one answer. There are lots of schemes out there.

Google is your friend, but you know that!

Great post. Thank you.