True. Politics have distorted this country's energy policy for far too long. It's very difficult for the rational, unbiased citizen to get a bead on what the facts are when the oil and coal industries have a nonstop, flat out F.U.D. campaign in place and have bought and paid for half of Congress and the White House. Then on the liberal left side, you have wacko Environmentalists with no sense of proportion who would rather save some rare desert butterfly, rather than move forward with alternative energy programs that might make the view ugly, but may possibly save millions of human lives, billions of dollars in economic benefits, remove the need for oil wars, and a host of other potential benefits.
When I discuss these issues, I wish for once that Americans would just come together and jointly agree that we have a serious energy problem and that we need to solve it. It doesn't matter where the ideas come from and we shouldn't automatically discard an idea if it comes from a different political party than yours. Lastly, we should all agree that solving this problem wont' involve a silver bullet. Instead, it will require a basket of approaches. In addition, we all have to recognize that in order to get to the future we have to provide a transition plan from the current energy regime to the next, and that means taking advantage of all of our nation's resources, instead of putting them off limits, whether it's leasing Fed land to solar companies or to oil companies or offshore permits to drill more.
In addition, we should put a high level working group together that involves the best brains from industry, science/academia, and the government to work together on crafting the framework for an entire new national energy policy and private industry. The method should be exactly how a venture capital company works. The focus should be on how do we incubate the new industry and how to we shepherd it to self-sustainability, and then to profitable growth. It should have tangible goals and deadlines and come with substantial Manhattan/Apollo project funding. We should also make sure we have consistent guidelines and regulations from the government and goals for when the government investments should be scaled back as the industry becomes self-sustainable. Then we should go balls out on achieving the plan.
The wealth that can and will come from this will lift all boats in the US, as the rest of the world follows our lead. But the window of opportunity here is small. We're already behind in almost every measure on a national level. Luckily, still many of the biggest innovators in alternative energy are here in the US thanks to Silicon Valley venture capital funding. So we still have plenty of opportunity to catch up and form a coherent national strategy that will ensure we capture the lion's share of the coming profits in this new energy regime to come. |
